278 Feedburner Fear Fiasco – Flat Fee or Pay Per GB – Interview Tip – The Return of MySpace And More!
Summary: Personal Plug of the Week This week's personal plug of the week is the Entrepreneur On Fire podcast from John Dumas. John has taken the bold challenge of creating a daily podcast that will feature interviews with inspiring entrepreneurs. I encourage you to check out the podcast. If you enjoy it, please let John know that you heard about it from Podcast Answer Man. FEEDBURNER FEAR FIASCO There was a widespread panic among bloggers and podcasters this past weekend. On Friday, many people woke up to find that Feedburner was reporting that all their feeds had zero subscribers. It's hard to explain just how many emails, tweets, facebook messages, etc that I had received regarding this issue. Rather than respond to anyone right away, I immediately tested feedburner and then wrote a blog post titled "Feedburner – Is The Sky Really Falling?" If you have not yet done so, I highly encourage you to read my Feedburner blog post and all the conversations within the comments. I'm happy to say that my prediction was correct. Feedburner had updated their status blog, letting the world know that they were aware of the issue and that they were working to resolve it. Had people heeded my suggestion of simply enjoying their weekend, they would have come back to find that not only did Feedburner resolve the issue, they also restored all the stats, during the days of the outage, to all accounts. I will argue that events of this weekend were the greatest thing to happen for those of us who use Feedburner. Why? Because it proves that Google does still have people who work on Feedburner, they do still have a status blog that they will update to let us know when they are working on a widespread issue. I share more of my thoughts in this podcast episode as well. Should I Pay A Flat Fee For Bandwidth or Pay Per GB? Recently, Deb had posted a question in the comments section of one of my recent blog posts. She wrote the following: Just about to pull the trigger and get a LibSyn account for podcasting, but got this new offer from my web hosting company Dreamhost and wondered what you all thought of it. They say, “Unlike traditional web hosting where monthly pricing is fixed and resources are unlimited, pricing for DreamObjects is usage-based. You only pay for data that you store on our servers and for the amount of data that is transferred from them. Storage costs start at $0.07 per GB (Amazon S3 starts at $0.12!) and scales all the way down to $0.044 per GB, depending on just how much data you choose to store with us. Outbound transfer costs are fixed at $0.07 per GB. All beta users will have access to a free trial period lasting TWO WHOLE months! During that time you'll not incur any charges as long as you store less than 10GB of data and transfer out less than 20GB. Anything more than 10 and 20 kind of tests the limits of the term "trial" and will incur $0.07/GB overage charges, both for storage and outbound data transfer." Thoughts about starting with this as opposed to LibSyn? Thanks! Deb In response to this, my main concern would be the issue of COST. Let’s say that you average about 60,000 downloads per month and that your average file size is about 50MB. 50MB x 60,000 is 3,000,000 MB or 2,929.69 GB If I were paying $0.07 per GB, I'd be paying $205.08 per month. With Libsyn, you could get their $40 per month account and the cost would be a GUARANTEED FLAT $40 per month. That means that you would save $1,980.96 per year with Libsyn over what you would pay with the Dream Host plan that is being considering. I personally prefer FLAT FEES for bandwidth rather than paying Per GB An Interview Tip That May Improve Your Podcast Interviews I was recently listening to a podcast interview where the host of the podcast seemed to feel the need to validate each and every single sentence their guest spoke with a "mmmh hmmm," a "Yeah, " or a "Right."
