Distributing Your Media File

Although the discussion was couched in somewhat general terms and assumed that your podcast and the Web site hosting your podcast were the same thing, they don't have to be. You can host your Web site using one solution and host your podcast media files somewhere completely different.

You may want to do this for several reasons, but they all generally boil down to the fact that MP3 files are much larger than Web pages, so you're going to use lots of bandwidth and lots of storage. This places unique demands on the server infrastructure, which may be a job handled by a trusted partner.

Understanding Distribution

One of the best things about podcasting is that it doesn't require any special serving software, like streaming media does. You just place the file on your Web server and update your RSS feed, and you're done. That's all fine and good when you're starting out and have a handful of faithful subscribers. But what happens when your podcast becomes wildly popular?

Several things happen. First, instead of downloading a handful of MP3 files to your listeners, you're suddenly sending out thousands of copies of your MP3 file. If your podcast is 5 minutes long and encoded at 128 Kbps, you're looking at a 5 MB file. A thousand downloads means you're talking about 5 GB of throughput. If you have a daily show, you're talking about over 150 GB per month. That's a pretty serious amount of traffic.

At this scale, things change significantly. Instead of sending out a few files when your friends check to see if you've updated your blog, your Web server is now running all day long. That means the disc drives are spinning, and much more wear and tear is being put on the machines. Servers have a much shorter shelf life than desktop computers for this reason. Most hosting companies plan on servers lasting approximately three years before they have to be replaced.

Of course, this is assuming that your podcast becomes popular enough to attract a large audience. That may not be your case. Your podcast may be niche content that is devoutly followed by a faithful few. Disregarding the size of your audience for the time being, your choices for hosting your media files break down as follows:

• Host it on your Web server.

• Host it on a content distribution network (CDN).

• Host it on a podcast hosting service.

• Use peer-to-peer distribution.

In the following sections, we talk about each of these possibilities in a little more detail.