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The Podcraft™ Podcast

Do I Need a Media Host? Podcraft S8E01

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Welcome to another episode of PodCraft. This is the show all about podcasting, from podcast equipment to recording skills and everything in between.

We’re changing it up a bit this week. Recently we’ve been posting a lot of interviews, but that’s not the case for this episode.

The plan is to try and get through a lot more listener questions. People get in touch asking us all sorts of different, interesting things around podcasting – so we’re going to try and get one out every week from now on.

We’ll be accepting in questions from the comments section of the website, our contact form, Twitter, or any other means in which you want to ask us!

Resources mentioned:

First up came a question from the website’s contact form, from Andy Macleod. He said:

Hi Colin / Matthew.
First of all, amazing website. Loving your work. I’ve just written an audio drama/sitcom on the music industry called Golden Ears (more on that in another email) and can’t tell you how helpful your site has been as I enter the do’s and don’t’s of podcasting world.

I’m working through your peerless website course and have 2 questions.  I have hosting for another website but using very little of its capacity. I’m planing to use WordPress and Blubrry for my audio drama/stomp podcast but should I buy up new hosting space rather than cross pollinate with another site hosting?  I’m just trying to think ahead if I outgrew space etc.

Also, on your course I’ve got to the section on RSS feeds and sending out each episode via Blubrry/PowerPress and you say now your podcast is on iTunes. But does it also send automatically to all the other directories?
Thanks again for all your help.
Best,
Andy Macleod

We’ll start off with Andy’s first question around hosting. To put it simply, you don’t want to go down the media host route. There’s a lot of dangers around hosting on your own site. It might seem fine at first, but it can cause you a lot of problems down the line.

Imagine being 50 episodes into your podcast with 50 audio files, that are all maybe up to 100 meg in size. They’re all being downloaded 50, 100, 200, maybe even thousands of times every week. Suddenly, you’ve got a huge amount of bandwidth there (or, to put it simply, you’re using up too much space).

And web hosts aren’t too happy about that. In fact, in their terms and conditions, they talk about things where they can shut you down, and they will. There’s plenty of court cases out there where that’s happened.

It’s better just to bite the bullet and go with a dedicated media host. As Andy mentioned, Blubrry are excellent, but there are other options available too. There’s Spreaker, Libsyn, and Podbean to name just three.

At the moment it doesn’t cost too much to get into. If you aren’t doing very much very often, a $5 a month plan will have you covered. A $10 or $15 a month plan will give you more than enough space.

If you’re interested in signing up to media hosting, we do have some affiliate codes for Libsyn and Blubrry so it would be much appreciated if you were to use them.

We offer a free month with Libsyn when you sign up using the coupon code podhost and a free month with Blubrry when you sign up using the coupon code podcraft. 

Now, onto Andy’s second question, about RSS feeds and directories.

The absolute priority once you’ve signed up with a media host, created your podcast and been given the RSS feed is to go and submit to iTunes and get on there. That’s the big daddy in the podcast directory world.

The great thing about being on iTunes is loads of other podcast directories and apps pull their directories directly from iTunes. Matthew has never submitted a podcast to Overcast, but all of his are on there, because they’re pulling it from iTunes.

The other big one is Stitcher, so you’re also catering into the Android market as well.

TuneIn is another one that’s well worth it, because it’s the one that ties in to digital radio. There’s also a smartphone app for TuneIn that’s pretty popular. There’s also, of course, ways to get onto Spotify through your host putting it forward (either Libsyn or Blubrry can do this). It’s up to Spotify whether they’ll take it or not, but it’s still an option.

If you’re a US podcaster it’s also worth getting onto Google Play Music, but you can’t yet get that if you’re in the UK.

Finally, we recommend that somewhere on your site, you have a page called ‘Subscribe’. Don’t go overboard here, but link out to a few of the main places we’ve listed if you’re on it. Post the links and let your listener decide where they want to hear it.

That’s it for this episode of PodCraft, hopefully we answered Andy’s question as well as we could.

Again, let us know your questions for the future and we’ll answer as many of them as we can. Here’s a reminder of where you can find us:

Get in touch with us on Twitter, drop us an email via the contact form, or leave us a comment on any relevant blog post!

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