Church Admin Plugin

Using Amazon AWS S3 cloud for sermons

✓ Free ⭐ Premium

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a cloud storage service ideal for hosting sermon audio files. Rather than storing large MP3 files on your web hosting account — which can quickly fill your storage allowance — S3 lets you store files cheaply in the cloud and stream them directly to your website visitors.

Why use Amazon S3 for sermons?

  • Storage cost — S3 storage costs a fraction of a penny per GB per month. A year’s worth of weekly sermon recordings typically costs less than $1 to store.
  • No hosting limits — uploading directly to your web host can quickly fill disk quotas. S3 has no practical limit.
  • Reliable delivery — S3 works well with the Church Admin podcast feed, unlike some third-party audio hosts whose URLs can change or expire.
  • Free tier — AWS S3 is free for the first 12 months for new accounts, including up to 20,000 downloads per month.

The Church Admin S3 uploader add-on

Church Admin has a built-in S3 uploader add-on that lets you upload sermon audio directly from the Church Admin media screen to your S3 bucket — without needing FTP or the AWS console. Purchase the add-on below:

AWS S3 Sermon Uploader

An easy to setup add on for uploading sermon mp3s to the AWS S3 cloud service

 

£5.00

Step 1 — Sign up for AWS

Go to aws.amazon.com and create an account if you don’t already have one.

Step 2 — Create an AWS user for the plugin

  1. In the top right of the AWS console, click your account name and select Security Credentials
  2. Click Create User
Create user button in AWS console
  1. Add a user name — for example church-admin-plugin — and click Next
Add user name in AWS
  1. On the permissions screen, scroll down and tick AmazonS3FullAccess, then click through to create the user

Step 3 — Create API access keys

  1. On the users list, click the user name you just created
Click user name in AWS users list
  1. Click Security Credentials, scroll down to Access Keys, and click Create Access Key
Create Access Key button in AWS
  1. Select Third Party Service as the use case and acknowledge the warning
Select Third Party Service use case in AWS
  1. Give the key a name, then click Create. Your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key are displayed — download them immediately. The secret key is only shown once and cannot be retrieved later. If you lose it you’ll need to create a new one.

Step 4 — Connect S3 to Church Admin

In your WordPress dashboard go to Premium Church Admin → AWS Settings. Enter your Access Key ID, Secret Access Key, and AWS region. Then choose an existing S3 bucket or create a new one to store your sermon files.

Click Check the bucket. Church Admin generates a bucket policy — copy it. You need to paste this into your S3 bucket manually in the next step — the API can’t do this automatically for security reasons.

Step 5 — Apply the bucket policy in AWS

  1. Go back to the AWS S3 console and click on your bucket
S3 bucket list in AWS console
  1. Click Permissions
Permissions tab on S3 bucket
  1. Scroll down to Bucket Policy and click Edit
Edit bucket policy in AWS S3
  1. Paste in the policy copied from Church Admin (where **** is your bucket name) and click Save:
{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "PublicReadGetObject",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": "*",
      "Action": "s3:GetObject",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::****/*"
    }
  ]
}
  1. Still in the Permissions tab, find Block Public Access and click Edit. Make sure all the checkboxes are unchecked, then save. This allows the audio files to be publicly accessible for streaming.

Step 6 — Test and start uploading

Back in your WordPress dashboard under Premium Church Admin → AWS Settings, use the test upload button to confirm everything is working. From now on when you add a sermon in Church Admin → Media → Add sermon, an upload button lets you send the audio file directly to your S3 bucket. The file URL is saved automatically against the sermon record.

Using S3 URLs without the add-on

If you prefer to upload files to S3 manually via the AWS console, you can still use S3 without the add-on. Upload the file to your bucket, copy its public URL, and paste it into the External URL field when adding or editing a sermon in Church Admin.

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