Podcast Hosting
There are lots of options for podcast hosting. Some podcast hosting services such as ourmedia.org will host your audio and video files for no cost, but it takes a while for things to happen and you get what you pay for when it comes to service. When you are evaluating podcast hosting services there are a number of factors to consider. Some key considerations you should take into account when it comes to podcast hosting
- How much bandwidth will you need?
- How much storage will you need?
- How much technical support will you need?
- Do you need help with your website and podcast feed?
To determine how much bandwidth and storage you will need for your podcast hosting, you will need to figure out the average length of your podcast and the quality of the audio you will use. Typically you can count on 1MB for every minute of your show if you are doing audio. So if you have 30 minute podcast you will need 30MB for every show that you host. If you do a podcast weekly and keep the last four podcasts stored on your podcasting host then you will need at least 120MB of storage. The real hard question to figure out is how much bandwidth you will need for your podcast hosting. It will depend on how many times you podcast gets downloaded. Multiply the number of downloads per month times the size of your average file and you will find out how much podcast hosting bandwidth you will need.
If you need lots of technical support for your podcast hosting, go with a focused podcast hosting company. The big guys like Yahoo hosting just don’t have a lot of time for podcasters.
Digital Podcast has used Midphase, Dreamhost and we now use a combination of Amazon’s EC2 service and Dreamhost. The reason we use Amazon is that we needed a dedicated server and the reason we use Dreamhost is that we have other sites hosted there and they provide 2TB of bandwidth in the basic account. Hard to beat the pricing at Dreamhost. (Note:If you buy your podcast hosting from these links we will make a few dollars from Dreamhost.)
We will be adding other services to this list as we get a chance to check them out.
