The Archive Keeps Growing. Plan For That.
Stream hosting, program and sermon archives, listener email and pledge-drive giving for Christian radio stations and broadcast ministries — on servers we own in the United States.
The Short Answer
A station is a hosting problem with an unusual shape: a live stream that must not drop, an archive that grows every single day and never shrinks, and two pledge drives a year that put more load on the site in a week than the other fifty combined. We host all three on a managed VPS from $59 a month on annual billing, with listener email sending from our own SMTP servers and billed on sends rather than list size.
Three Problems A General Host Does Not Plan For
The stream cannot drop
Dedicated resources rather than a shared box whose neighbours you cannot see, with monitoring that tells us before a listener emails you. We host the origin and the station site; keep your existing stream distributor if it works.
The archive only grows
Daily programs, sermon series, interviews and special broadcasts accumulate forever. Recent content stays on fast storage; the back catalogue moves to object storage at roughly $8 per terabyte a month behind a cache, so ten years of programming costs a predictable line rather than forcing a painful clear-out.
Pledge week is the real load test
Two weeks a year your site takes more traffic and more transactions than the rest of the year together. That is a capacity conversation to have in advance, not during.
- Most email platforms relay through someone else The platform you use may not own the sending infrastructure. When it does not, the relay’s acceptable use policy governs what you can send and to whom, regardless of what the platform told you.
- Liberation Campaign runs on our own SMTP and our own software Our servers, our software, in data centers we own in the United States. For a ministry whose annual budget depends on two email-driven pledge weeks, that is a materially different risk profile.
- Deliverability is still a discipline Owning the relay removes the policy risk, not the filtering. Authentication, list hygiene and sending patterns still decide whether your drive appeal reaches the inbox — and a pledge week is the worst possible time to discover a broken DNS record.
We Own The Mail Servers, Not Just The Web Servers
A station’s listener list funds the pledge drive. It is worth knowing who runs the machines it sends from.
Giving, On The Air And Off It
Pledge drives and recurring partners
One-time pledges during a drive and recurring monthly partners the rest of the year, processed through an account set up for a ministry. Recurring giving is where station budgets actually stabilise.
Listener email that is not billed by list size
Liberation Campaign charges for emails sent. A station with a 30,000-name listener list that mails twice a month pays for those sends, not for storing the names — $20 a month covers 40,000 emails.
Underwriters and sponsors
A media kit, rate card, underwriter pages and the reporting a sponsor asks for, on a site you control rather than a template your network supplies.
- Program schedule, hosts and the listen-live button The four things every listener came for, findable in one tap on a phone in a truck. Most station sites bury at least two of them.
- Program and sermon archives that can be searched By program, host, speaker, series, date and topic. An archive nobody can search is storage, not a ministry asset.
- Podcast feeds from the same content Your programs already exist as audio. Publishing them as podcast feeds reaches a different audience from the same work, and the feed belongs to you.
The Station Website Listeners Actually Use
Studio And Office IT
The network behind the board
Automation systems, studio workstations, the office network and the remote-broadcast connection. Separated properly so a spreadsheet on the office PC cannot reach the machine running your log.
Backups of the thing you cannot recreate
Program archives and automation libraries, backed up off site and encrypted, from $2.09 a month. A lost archive is lost permanently.
Staff and volunteer email
Hosts, production, traffic, development and the board, on your own domain, from $1.95 per user a month.
- Managed VPS from $59/mo annual ($79/mo monthly) — 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 6TB transfer
- Archive object storage roughly $8 per TB per month, cached
- Liberation Campaign send-based: $10/mo for 10,000 emails, $20/mo for 40,000, $45/mo for 100,000 — our own SMTP infrastructure
- Liberation Email from $1.95 per user/mo; Mail Pro $7.95 per user/mo
- Hub for Teams $7.49 per user/mo
- CodeGuard encrypted off-site backups from $2.09/mo; SiteLock from $14.99/mo
- Studio and office IT scoped per station
Christian Radio & Broadcast Ministries FAQs
Do we have to move our streaming provider?
No. If your stream distribution works, keep it. We host the station website, the archive, the podcast feeds, the giving and the studio network around it.
Who sends our listener email?
We do, on our own SMTP servers and our own software. There is no third-party relay with a policy that could override ours — which matters for a ministry whose budget depends on two email-driven pledge weeks a year.
How do you handle an archive that grows every day?
Recent programming stays on fast VPS storage where it is requested most; the back catalogue moves to object storage at roughly $8 per terabyte a month behind a cache. Cost grows slowly and predictably instead of forcing a purge.
Can the site handle pledge week?
Yes, if you tell us when it is. We provision ahead of a date you already know rather than reacting after the site slows down in the middle of a drive.
Can we take recurring monthly partners as well as one-time pledges?
Yes. Both one-time and recurring giving can be set up, which is what turns a pledge drive into a stable monthly base.
Can you support the studio, not just the website?
Yes. Automation and studio networking, office network separation, remote broadcast connectivity and tested backups are normal scope, remotely and on site where coverage allows.
Talk To Us Before The Next Drive
Tell us your archive size, your listener list and when your pledge weeks fall. We will scope the hosting, the giving and the studio network around your calendar.
Custom Solutions
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