Awhile back I covered how do you start a podcast, citing that it’s a valuable additional source of content to create ou’d probably like to know once you finish your podcast and render it as an MP3, how do you put it online so people can find it? Note that stores like iTunes aren’t hosting your podcast, they’re basically just housing a link to it/accessing its feed to it via their store to give it more exposure. You need a place which services like iTunes can refer to to supply your podcast, so let’s look at the most popular and best options for where to upload your podcast.
Where to Upload Your Podcast
Your Web Site – First and most obviously on the list of where to upload your podcast, you can host it on your own website if you have the space and bandwidth available on your hosting account. Many hosting providers limit the amount of disk space you can take up for your website(s) or they limit the amount of bandwidth your site can consume, so if you have a lot of podcasts and your site is getting a lot of people downloading those podcasts from your site, if your hosting provider has these finite limits then you can find yourself in trouble with your host.
Still, other hosting providers such as my personal recommendation, HostGator, aren’t nearly as strict and offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth.
Hosting it yourself is not only a good way to ensure people come to your site rather than going to an external podcast hosting site, but it cuts down on costs as well. Most sites which host podcasts for you offer free rates up to a certain amount of disk space, but if you plan on releasing a lot of content each month, week, or even day then you’ll likely have to pay a monthly fee. Let’s talk about some of the better options.
PodBean
PodBean is the standard for thousands of podcasters because they offer a number of different pricing tiers which will suit any podcaster’s needs.
Their pricing starts at $3 a month which affords you 100mb of monthly storage space. This means as long as you don’t upload more than 100mb of content a month, you can use this plan. At the end of the month, however much content you’ve uploaded in disk space resets back to zero. Most podcast hosting platforms use this same system. If you’re only uploading one or two podcasts a month, assuming you’re rendering them on a low MP3 quality, 100mb is more than enough.
If you find you’re just going over that, starting at $8 a month, PodBean offers unlimited storage and bandwidth which is perfect for most podcasters who are looking to put a lot of content out whether that’s weekly, biweekly, or even daily.
Regardless of the plan, all of their plans come with basic features like owning your own podcast site with a number of different themes and built in RSS Feed (another staple amongst these services) and iTunes support which helps to make sure you don’t have to worry about your podcast getting out there as it’s all done for you so you can focus on making great content.
The $3 plan is the best one I have found when it comes to all of the premium podcasting hosting providers as it gives you plenty of features and likely more than enough storage space and bandwidth to accommodate most podcasters, so keep that in mind.
Soundcloud
Most people think of Soundcloud as a place for musicians but a lot of podcasters are using it, as well, and SoundCloud’s specific podcasting program is in beta at the time of this article. Like with most services, Soundcloud offers free and paid plans. The major constraint of the free plan is the disk space ceiling as you’re limited to 3 hours of content which for a lot of podcasters only affords the space to upload one or two episodes tops.
Their unlimited disk space/time plan runs at $15 a month and that comes with access to better analytics such as information on who is playing your episodes, where your listeners are from to hear which episodes are popular where, and you can even learn which pages, apps, and social networks your episodes are being played from.
Libsyn
Libsyn starts at $5 for 50mb monthly storage and $15 for 250mb monthly storage (plus free basic analytics), but truthfully the service doesn’t start to get valuable until you hit the higher tiers.
At $20 you can get your own Smartphone App which helps to give your podcast more unique branding and they have more expensive options from there which will net you better analytics and more storage space each month which will fit virtually any podcaster’s requirements. Libsyn is a popular choice amongst a lot of the big name podcasters such as Marc Maron.
Whichever service you go with whether it’s one of these or someone else, once you have your built in RSS feed which will come with your podcast hosting plan, you can simply give that to whichever online store you want your podcast to appear in.
This will ensure that any time you upload a new episode to your podcast host, the RSS feed will be updated and that new episode will automatically be reflected and appear in any store which you have given your RSS feed to.