Dedicated Podcast Hosting Services

Dedicated podcast services host your podcast files, provide statistics, and automatically generate your RSS. Some also include a Web site, which is usually a blog. Quite a few of these services are available at various price points and offering different services. For example, most offer some sort of Web site with your account. Some offer a free service, but place ads before your podcast. Many offer a trial period, which is a great way to see how well their tools work. Following are a few examples of podcast hosting services.

PodOMatic

PodOMatic(http://www.podomatic.com), shown in Figure 1, is a complete podcast hosting solution, complete with a Web site for each member. PodOMatic offers both free and paid accounts. The free service gives you up to 15 GB of data transfer and 500 MB of storage per month. They also have two levels of paid service called Pro and Pro+. The Pro service upgrades your storage to 2 GB and upgrades the bandwidth to 100 GB per month, which they say is equivalent to 4,000 downloads per month for a 15-minute show. The Pro+ service upgrades the transfer to 200 GB per month or 8,000 downloads. PodOMatic Pro is $9.99 per month; PodOMatic Pro+ is $14.99 per month. The Pro services also offer enhanced statistics including what they call geo-ip maps showing where your listeners are on a map of the world.

Figure 1: PodOMatic is a dedicated podcast hosting solution.

Liberated Syndication (Libsyn)

Liberated Syndication, or as it's commonly called, Libsyn (http://www.libsyn.com), is another complete podcast hosting service, offering service at rates based on the amount of storage you use, with no limit on the number of downloads. Libsyn, shown in Figure 2, charges by the month for its services, which come in $5, $10, $20, and $30 levels with 100MB, 250MB, 525MB, and 800MB storage capacities respectively.

Figure 2: LibSyn charges only for storage, not for bandwidth used.

One of the nice things about Libsyn is that it gives you advanced statistics, shown in Figure 3 even with the lowest cost service.

Figure 3: LibSyn offers detailed statistics to all members.

Radio Userland

Userland (http://radio.userland.com), shown in Figure 4, was founded by Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS and co-inventor, along with Adam Curry, of podcasting. Radio Userland is the oldest blogging service and has had podcasting support built in since the very beginning. Radio Userland has both a Web and a desktop-based component to its service. A basic subscription is $40 per year. Radio Userland does not provide hosting support for your podcast files, but it does have one of the all-time best set of blogging features.

Figure 4: Radio Userland is the granddaddy of all podcast hosting services.

Blogging services with podcasting support

Many blogging services are starting to offer podcasting support. Some have integrated podcasting support, some have add-ins you can use to enable podcasting support, and some require the use of services such as Feedburner or can be used with a manually created RSS feed.

Here is a short list of some blogging services with different degrees of podcast support:

• WordPress + PodPress: Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.com) is a popular blogging service, and PodPress (http://www.mightyseek.com/podpress/) offers a Wordpress plug-in that supports podcasting.

• Moveable Type: Moveable Type (http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/) is a free blogging service that can be used with Feedburner.

• MSN Spaces: MSN Spaces(http://spaces.live.com)is the largest free blogging service and can support podcasting by using Feedburner's SmartCast feature.

• TypePad: TypePad (http://www.typepad.com) offers built-in podcasting support.