The Podcast Pedant

All right. It’s about time this blog started putting out some productive advice and opinions. This post is an extension of today’s warning about bad bandwidth plans, and is meant to answer the question, “Okay then, smartass, what should I do for hosting?”

Here’s what you should do.

First, look at cheap unlimited hosting. As of today, the end of February 2006, you’ve got four practical choices in this category that I know about:

• Liberated Syndication: Starting at $5/month. Full-featured, excellent service, and a unique “rolling archives” feature that ensures you’ll never have to delete your old files for space. A large percentage of the podcast world is hosted at Libsyn, which makes for a mighty uproar when they suffer one of their occasional downtimes.
• Podlot: Also starting at $5/month. No frills, and a Web site that almost seems calculated to make you think the company is deceased. For that matter, they have a habit of closing to new customers every so often, to ensure they don’t outgrow their service capacity. But if you can get past those hurdles, they are rock solid reliable in my experience.¹ If you don’t need much hand-holding, just a place to put your files, Podlot will give you that.
• The Internet Archive: Unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, no cost. The site’s run as a public service. ² The catch? There’s an approval delay before each file’s available, so if you’re podcasting on a schedule you can’t rely on timely updates. Also, transfer speeds can be erratic. But it’s a hell of a deal, and when combined with a free blog provider or the community front-end OurMedia it’s one of the best ways to publish a podcast for free.
• Gcast: A relatively new player on the scene. I know that they’re free, and they don’t seem to have any restrictive limits, but to be honest I don’t know that much about them. I do know that they’re a service of GarageBand Records, and that there are buttons and levers inside it to help promote GB’s music, but it isn’t compulsory. Rob Walch recommends them to many people, and he’s a smarter podcasting guru than I am, so that ought to carry some weight.

Those are the major options. If you have other recommendations, please let me know and I’ll update this. The only other free-and-cheap plans I know about are either poorly supported or stick ads into your podcast as a tradeoff for the hosting. I consider that a bad trade.

So what if you don’t like any of the above options? Hey, that’s fine. You may prefer having everything on your own domain. Managing your own content gives you flexibility. It gives you peace of mind, and possibly service level guarantees. And it means everything that goes out is under your own URL, which looks professional and keeps your branding consistent. These are all good reasons. They may or may not override “Free or cheap unlimited” for you, but it’s at least worth thinking about.

If you do decide to serve your own files, shop around carefully for a hosting provider. Pay close attention to their usage agreement: some ultra-cheap shops have language in their contracts that restricts your use of adult language or content, or says you can’t serve MP3 files, or other such nonsense.³ And check on their reputation, too. My favorite place to research providers is WebHostingTalk.com. A bad host will probably have dozens of posts trashing them in the forum archives there. A good host will only have one or two.

As I mentioned earlier, pay close attention to the bandwidth offered in the plan. Don’t even think about a host offering less than 100 GB a month — you’ll be sweating bullets if your podcast gets popular all of a sudden. Fortunately you can get good plans meeting or exceeding that for less than $10/month. The host that handles my Web sites, Dreamhost,⁴ recently upped its bandwidth from 120 GB to a ridiculous 1 Terabyte for $7.95 a month. That’s a deal that would cover all but the top tier of podcasts. They’ve got some quirks in how they do things, and I did have some technical issues with them last year (eventually resolved), but they’re feature-rich and I never had a problem with actually getting the files served.

I want to emphasize again, however: check the host’s reputation online. Every shared hosting plan sells more bandwidth than it has. Usually this is not a problem, because very few users are capable of getting close to the limits. But podcasters can, and a bad host with a shoddy network can easily buckle under the strain once your new episode hits the feed and you’re serving several dozen large media files all at once. Don’t agree to anything that will lock you in if your host turns out to be a bad one.

Beyond $10-and-under shared hosting, things start to get pricy. If you’re really serious about your content, you could look at dedicated servers. Your very own machine in a rack in some high-tech bunker, serving only what you tell it to. You need to be technically savvy to even consider this option, and it’s probably not economically wise for a podcast alone. Plans start at around $70/month, and you can start to find unmetered bandwidth plans (where what matters isn’t how much you serve a month, but how “wide” the pipe is, i.e. how many bits per second) for about $120/month. That could be smart if you’re running a whole online business, but if you’re thinking about that just for some MP3 files, I’d go back and look at Libsyn and Podlot again in the list above. Similar benefits, but for $5/month. Both services have served very popular podcasts. If you think you’re too big for them, you’re probably not reading this blog for advice.

So those are your “good” options. Pay $0 to $5 for unlimited bandwidth managed by someone else; or take matters into your own hands and pay $5 to $10 for large finite bandwidth (100 GB or above) managed by yourself. Both are respectable choices, although people in both camps tend come up with reasons for thinking the other camp is crazy. Seeing the options laid out like that, you’ve probably got an instinctive sense for which one you’re comfortable with.

Do your homework, take your pick, and good luck. Meanwhile, don’t forget to record something to host!

1. Disclaimer: Yes, my own MP3 files are hosted at Podlot. You should evaluate all advice for bias, including mine. ↩
2. And someday I hope Brewster Kahle wins the Nobel Peace Prize. ↩
3. Some hosts do this for fear of copyright infringement suits. Some do it for fear that you’ll eat too much of their bandwidth. Either way, you don’t need them. ↩
4. Yes, that’s a referral link. Don’t like it? Chop off everything after the slash. ↩

Via Podcasting News: another hosting service for the mathematically challenged. This one’s called PodshowCreator.com.

The name is a striking example of audacity — or perhaps the scarcity of podcast-related domains now. I’m no fan of Podshow, but I suspect they’d be entirely justified in nailing these guys to protect their trademark. I hope they won’t have to, however, as I sincerely hope there aren’t too many people who’d sign onto a podcasting plan offering 2 GB of transfer for $14.95 a month.

I’m saying this not specifically to embarrass PodshowCreator.com (they don’t need my help there) but because they’re exemplary of an entire class of hosting providers that consider themselves “podcast friendly.” The main problems with these providers needs to be made obvious and conspicuous, for the benefit of newbies Googling for a podcast host.

In PSC.c’s case, the long division is easy. At their cheapest level you get 200 MB of disk space and 2 GB of bandwidth. Let’s say you run a twice weekly music podcast, and your files are all 20 MB each. 2000 MB / 20 MB = 100 downloads. If you’ve posted ten shows in a month, you can afford a maximum of ten subscribers before you get hit for extra bandwidth charges. At $14.95 a month you’re paying a buck fifty per subscriber. And you’d best hope no one ever downloads twice, and your MP3s don’t get crawled by engines like Podscope, Podzinger, etc.

“Ah, but you can upgrade!” the provider would probably say. That’s just shoveling money into the fire. Their highest level, at $97/month for 20 GB, boggles the mind. You could get a dedicated server with unmetered transfer for just a bit more than that.¹

So what should you do? I’ll have a post about that shortly. For now, the significant takeaway is that any hosting plan you ever consider for podcasting should be measured at least in the hundreds of gigabytes, if not unlimited. That will give you room to grow. High-bandwidth and unlimited plans are available for much cheaper than $14.95 a month — they’re even available for free. That doesn’t mean that “free unlimited” is the right answer for everyone, but getting less than you need for more than you need to pay isn’t the right answer for anyone.

1. Believe me, I’ve thought about it. ↩

Patrick (from Nobody Likes Onions) and I have had our differences in the past. I cannot elaborate, or I risk collapsing under the weight of euphemism.

Disregarding all that, however, he has written a fairly kickass tool that will check your podcast’s RSS feed for errors that could break clients, common mistakes that could confuse people, and missing elements that it simply thinks you should have. And he’s just updated it to bring it more in line with current iTunes specs and to be more thorough in its RSS syntax checking. Find it here:

http://www.nobodylikesonions.com/feedcheck/