The Best Podcast Host Services for Churches

Technically, it’s not required. If you know coding language and RSS standards, you could write and maintain the RSS feed yourself.

But have you ever tried leaving someone a message without paper and pen? Maybe you wrote with soap on the mirror or ketchup on a plate. You found a way, just a messier way. As pen and paper are an essential tool for written communication, a host service is essential to podcasting. They provide a user friend interface to upload your content and spit out a robot friendly RSS feed for distribution, getting back vital hours in your week.

But which one is right for you? I’m going to briefly showcase some of my favorite hosting services for churches and faith leaders.

General Considerations for Hosting Services

First, lets cover a bit more about what a hosting service actually does for you. The core of every hosting service is the creation and management of an RSS feed for you. You are still in control of all your content! The hosting service just helps serve your audio up for people to listen on platforms like Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and others.

This is beneficial in several ways: it speeds up the upload process with automation, offloads traffic from your own website so it doesn’t crash, and gives high quality analytics even down to the location of listeners (anonymously of course).

Beyond the RSS feed, hosting services offer a slew of bonus features to try and draw people in. This includes websites, audiograms, dynamic show notes, team member, multiple feeds, guest booking, memberships, video, private feeds, and more. As you can imagine, you can get lost in the comparison charts between services.

Therefore, you really need to know your goals for your podcast so you don’t over pay for features you don’t need. My purpose here is not to give you an exhaustive list but to highlight a few hosting services I feel would be a good fit for a church or faith leader. Let’s get started.

Feature Rich Hosting Services

1. Captivate.fm – This is the hosting service I currently use. The reason I chose it a few years ago is because they allow for multiple podcast RSS feeds to be created for the same monthly price. There is a monthly cap on downloads across all shows. However, it is not a hard ceiling and if you go over once or twice, they won’t force you up to the next tier but you will probably get an invitation. Captivate is great for churches who wants to try other spiritual development podcasts beyond their sermon.In the three years I’ve used Captivate, they have continually built more features to benefit their users. Since I started, they’ve added dynamic show notes, private feeds, premium feeds, dynamic insertion, free access to their entire academy on podcasting, and lots more. You can get a 7-day free trial to check out everything for yourself by using my link. Disclaimer: I am an affiliate for Captivate so if you do use it, it does help support me. They do have a 25% discount for non-profits!
2. Subsplash – Subsplash is not a a podcast hosting service at it’s core but a one-stop-shop for churches with a digital presence. They offer websites, giving tools, live streaming, events management, small group management, and more. With their media hosting, they can also create an RSS feed for your podcast. It’s not very public on their website. It feels more like a bonus feature requested by a few users. Here’s a link to their knowledge base article about podcasting with them. However, if you’re looking to take the digital streets by storm, Subsplash is great option for churches to try. Subsplash is built and priced for churches so no additional discounts.

Dynamic Hosting Services

1. RSS.com – RSS is a new player in the hosting field but I’ve heard good reviews. They have a $5/month plan for non-profits. That gets you a website, embeddable player, analytics, simple social promos, audio-to-video conversion, episode transcripts, and direct customer support. Pretty much no limit on episode length, number of episodes, or number of downloads unlike other services! Pretty good bang for your buck in my opinion. NOTE: You do have to contact them directly to get the NPO plan!
2. Libsyn – Libsyn in one of the oldest podcast hosting services. I started out with them when I first got into podcasting but moved on because of a clunky interface that looked like it was from the 90s. However, others have told me it has been updated! They have a $5/month plan with a website, embeddable player, analytics, simple social promos, and built-in recording. Libsyn’s gotcha is audio file sizes. They only allow 3 hours of content uploaded each month at that price so if your pastor goes long consistently, might not be the best choice.
3. SermonAudio.com – I want to like this site. But I can’t. It looks how Libsyn used to look and is overpriced compared to other options at $50/month plus a one-time start fee of $150. To their credit, they also do live broadcasting and have a local church finder with a decent user base to back them up. I haven’t used it personally but maybe I’ll get a demo and make a video on it.

Free Hosting Services

1. Spotify for Podcasters (formerly Anchor) – Spotify for Podcasters is where many people start podcasting. Spotify is banking a lot on user-generated content for ad revenue similar to YouTube’s model. From audio recording and editing to monetization, it’s actually become a pretty decent option. It’s also the only way to get a video podcast on Spotify as of writing this. They only have a free plan so no discounts.
2. Acast – Acast was who I went to after Libsyn. They offered a much friendlier user interface. Currently, Acasts’ free plan also includes unlimited downloads and storage, an embeddable player, analytics, and even remote recording powered by Podcastle. The only reason I left Acast was because I was building more medium sized podcasts for churches. No non-profit discounts that I can find on their website.
3. Podbean – There free plan is pretty basic and it’s metered, meaning you only get 5GB of storage a month and a capped number of downloads. If you’re just doing a sermon podcast, I doubt you’d reach that capacity each month. Unless an Asbury-type revival hits, then you might need to increase you plan. Which you can do as they offer lots of other features on their paid plans including live streaming your show! No extra discounts on paid plans for non-profits.

A note on switching hosting services: If you start with one service, it’s actually a relatively easy process to change to another. Most have a way to ingest the RSS feed and redirect the old URL to the new one. You’ll lose historical analytics but your feed and subscribers will be unaffected! Your people are hungry for the Word. Don’t get hung up on the hosting service!