Despite the finality of the past two posts, Podfading and ending a show, today I want to address the problems, excuses and reasons why we fail to start our first shows.
Thinking back to the year between “I think I should do a podcast” and “There’s the first episode up and live.” the reasons for not starting were all a bit sad really. The primary reason, I told myself, was I just didn’t understand the mechanics of podcasting. You can learn this here (Blog post) and here (YouTube video) and here (Podcast).
Then the next stumbling block was hosting. “But I have a website! Do I have to pay for more hosting? Grrrr.”
Well, “Yes” and “Yes”. And there are good reasons for it.
If you are fortunate and suddenly your podcast numbers explode, the calls on the website server, especially if it’s a shared server, will likely crash it. At the very least your website host will threaten to remove you as you’ll have breached its fair use agreement. This is the case even if you have “unlimited” bandwidth.
An audio hosting service is highly specialised. Many hosting companies have come and gone. A few like Libsyn, my main host and Blubrry have been around for a long while. They charge reasonable fees, starting at US$5 a month for 50megs of uploaded content. This might not sound like much but it is just about enough for four half hour mp3 files at 64kps in mono. To understand why these are the best compromise between listening quality and download speed read this post: 3.12 Production Standards.
These hosts and there are others but these are the specialists who I use for my long term projects. Libsyn has many features I’ll cover in another upcoming post. Just know that paying for a professional service, even at the US$5 per month level is both a modest cost and great investment.
Takeaways
- Understand how your audio moves from your laptop to your listener’s ears.
- Pay for some hosting.
- Re-read this post: What Gear Do You Really Need?.
- Start recording and producing content and get yourself live.
- Do not wait the twelve months I did.