When first starting a podcast, I found a slew of information in the blogosphere regarding where to host your site, but as I looked for a specific storage solution for the mp3 files themselves, I ran into some problems.  Hosting dynamic web pages through Wordpress, or whatever your blog of choice, has very different requirements than the static hosting of your mp3.

As I was looking at my podcasts over the month, I found I was producing two weekly hour-long podcasts.  At about 1 mb per minute, this was adding up to ~480 mb of storage per month.  Not too overwhelming, until you consider the bandwidth.  Those two podcasts were pulling in about 1,200 downloads a week.  That’s 144 gb per week, or 576 gb per month! Looking at a sample GoDaddy hosting account (which I don’t recommend for podcast hosing), I would pay $16 per month and still be short bandwidth.  Considering the cheapest I’ve found extra bandwidth was $0.50/gb, and there are some hosts that charge up to $4/gb extra, this is a chunk of change in the $38 – $304 range.

Let’s face it.  We don’t podcast for the money, and $16 a month for a podcast usually means a loss of $16 a month.  The goal then, is to keep the number with the $ symbol in front of it small, and the number of downloads large.  So now what?

Let’s face it. We don’t podcast for the money, and $16 a month for a podcast usually means a loss of $16 a month.

Amazon S3

I probably shouldn’t even have listed this one, but it’s a professional service that can’t be ignored if you’re looking for that level of quality.  Amazon offers static storage through their S3 service at a rate calculated on space requirements and bandwidth.  The problem?  The more downloads you have, the more you pay.  In this case, about $98 a month.  Like I said, not really a solution for our pocketbooks, but if you just have to have the security and redundancy that S3 offers, this is worth looking at.  Not for me.  http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Unlimited Space/Bandwidth Shared Plans

Buyer beware!  There’s been a lot of talk about these so-called “unlimited” plans, and the talk isn’t good.  The promise is whatever space or bandwidth you need, you get.  Some of these plans are for as little as $3 per month, which sounds too good to be true;  Often they are.  Looking into the TOS of one of these services, I found this:

…Customers may not use excess server processing power that will create a negative impact on the performance of the server and other customers on that space. In these circumstances, access or downloads to your site may be limited.

The real catch here is that you have no control what-so-ever over what impacts the performance of the server.  How many other people are using this server?  If it’s $3 a month, you can guess there are quite a few.  How robust is the server?  Again, if it’s $3 a month, not much.  While this type of plan will probably work if you only have a couple dozen listeners, there’s plenty of better alternatives that will not leave you up a creek when your show goes platinum.

Archive.org

Speaking of “sounds too good to be true,” there’s Archive.org.  Before I scare you away I should confess that this is the method I use.  Here’s how it works according to Archive.org:

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.

From a podcaster who was recently bitten by the Podango shutdown, I can tell you this is still a concern of mine.

Simply put, they’re archiving the internet one file at a time.  There is no cost, but there are some, shall we say issues.  The first is that you’re donating your file to the archive.  You can choose several different Creative Commons Licenses, which offers what I would consider great copyright protection, or you can simply donate it to the public domain.  The other issue I have is ethical.  It’s tough to determine whether or not you’re taking advantage of the service.  They are a non-profit organization and I sometimes question whether my material is actually benefiting their cause.  It mostly is, but we all have those lame podcasts where we don’t really say much.  Add in that Archive.org reserves the right to remove any file at any time and it may cause some consternation for those of us who have years of podcasting files available.  From a podcaster who was recently bitten by the Podango shutdown, I can tell you this is still a concern of mine.  http://www.archive.org

Libsyn

As I researched for this post, it quickly became obvious who the leading podcast hosting provider was.  Libsyn (Liberated Syndication) provides a podcast-specific hosting plan that allows you to pay for your monthly storage, and receive unlimited bandwidth.  Here, “unlimited” isn’t as scary as we saw before, and here’s why.  While Libsyn offers blog hosting plans on their site, they are set up specifically for static file hosting.  Libsyn was built around storing and allowing access to large audio files, and have specialized their servers for just such files.  Not without it’s own teething problems, Libsyn has been known to have some uptime problems, but nothing more than a typical shared server, and certainly a reasonable amount for the price.  Having been acquired by Wizard Software in 2007, the backing seems to be in place for a long-term solution for podcasters.  Pricing?  Very reasonable.  Remembering that they charge for monthly additional storage and not bandwidth, my example of two podcasts at 480 mb of monthly storage and 576 gb of bandwidth would cost $20 a month.  Not a bad price considering there are no extra fees if your podcast suddenly get’s popular.  http://www.libsyn.com

All in all, you have to decide what your podcast’s needs are.  Are you willing to pay for almost 100% up-time?  Are you willing to donate your work to an internet archive?  Or do you prefer the middle of the road solution?  Whatever your needs, the answer is most likely out there.  Now stop reading blogs, and start podcasting!