In this episode I talk about what a podcast host does, what to look for in a podcast host, and I tell you my three favorite podcast hosts.

How to choose your podcast toast?

Welcome everybody to the podcast answers podcast.

That's right. It's another episode,

another week and we get to do this show once again.

So if you've never joined us,

what we do is we help people start and grow a podcast,

answering any podcasting questions along the way.

So that's right. You have questions, we answer them.

We want to get into this today.

We are going to be talking about how to choose a podcast host.

There's things to look for.

I'm going to show you my three probably go-to podcast hosts

that you can use if you want.

I'm going to tell you why I like these three podcast hosts.

But first, we want to do boost a gram corner.

Now it's time for the boost a boost a boost a boost a gram corner

boost a gram corner.

I don't know a thing about crypto.

All right. After our episode with Sam Sethi,

we had a couple of people boost us in a new podcasting app.

First is mere mortals podcast boosted in 22 sets and says Sam is the man.

And I'm super keen to see where pod fans will be in six months.

And also the tone record sent in 1200 sets and said many nuggets of wisdom

in this conversation, both with how the value for value model is possible now,

but also features it enables within the broader podcast 2.0 players and Sam's new venture.

Some of those options like share listing will be worth checking out.

So thanks both of you to putting in those feedback.

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How do you pick a podcast host?

There's a Cajillion podcast host that you can choose that you can use to host your files.

So first off, why do we need a podcast host and what does it do?

So podcasting hosts host your files.

They, your media files, your MP3 files, your audio, they host that as well as create

an RSS feed for you.

You cannot just keep your podcast episodes on a normal web site host, you know,

like for instance, GoDaddy or HostGator or HostMonster or Bluehost or anywhere that

you're hosting files or your website with, you cannot do that with your podcast.

And the reason for that is because you're going to be hosting lots of large files

and possibly get lots and lots of traffic to your site.

At once.

And that would bring their system down.

Their system is designed to send single webpages, designed to send easy little small files.

It's not designed to send multi megabyte files, you know, 50, 100 megabyte files to

thousands of people at once.

So you can't, you just can't do that.

In fact, if you try that, they're probably going to kick you off their system because

you just can't do that.

They're going to complain to you because you don't, yeah, they're just going to complain

to you because you can't do that.

So they're going to host your media files.

They're going to host and create your RSS feed.

And an RSS feed, if you are not aware, is kind of like the broadcast tower.

If you were going to be thinking of the whole podcasting thing like a radio.

And what the RSS feed does is it tells your podcast app that you have a new episode.

It tells you where the media file is.

It tells you what the show notes are.

It tells you what the episode art is.

It's how your podcast is delivered to podcast apps.

So here are things that, that hosts things.

They also generally host other things that go with your podcast.

You like transcripts or episode art.

Again, podcast hosts host your episode art, your transcripts, your media files, your

RSS feed.

So it's a big deal.

It's a big, big deal.

And sometimes they even offer you a website like a show page or an episode page.

Most, most podcast hosts are going to have some sort of website that you can get for

your show.

So that may be something like yourshow.buzzsprout.com or yourshow.blueberry.com or whatever.

Or maybe on your own, your own domain and lots, we can get further into that down the episode.

But, but what they do is they offer you a show page where you can send people to see your

episodes, especially if you don't have your own, your own website already.

So here's some of the things that we need to think about when looking for a podcast host.

How much space versus downloads per month slash year are you getting from your podcast host?

So podcast hosts measure the, the amount of data that you can do.

So they may, some podcast hosts say you can upload so many megabytes per month.

Well, that'd be, you know, 200, 500, 600 megabytes per month.

Some of them will say you can have this many downloads per month.

So you can have unlimited uploads.

But when your podcast gets popular, you may have a problem because you'll run out of downloads.

They may say you can only have 1200 downloads a month or, or whatever.

Now there's one podcast host and we'll talk about them in a little bit.

But one podcast host that says you can have this many hours of upload.

They don't even give you the option of how many megabytes.

They just say how many hours.

And I'll touch a little bit on that when we get down a little bit further to that one.

Because they are one of my recommended podcast hosts.

So we will touch on, on the fact that they do that.

So one thing to consider, how much space or downloads are they giving you per month?

Some podcast hosts give you more for your dollar.

Some people give you less.

It's going to be all kind of work out the same in the long run.

So, so we'll, we'll, we'll kind of talk about that a little bit.

Because one of my podcast hosts that I recommend is the way that it does is the downloads.

So can we work all of those out?

They kind of work out to be about the same per month per cost.

Some hosts are a little more, some are a little less.

Some things to take into consideration also are can your podcast host do add insertion?

And by that, I either mean programmatically added insertion where they sell your ad slots to a company

and they put them in your show.

Or can you upload your own ads and put them in?

And that's kind of handy because, you know, a lot of times I, I have the ability with my podcast host that I listen,

that I use to say, I want this file to go before my episode.

So as soon as you hit play, you're going to hear audio.

And then my episode, I have the ability to put it afterwards.

And then so you listen to the episode and then you hear the ad or even put it right in the middle.

I can tell them the slots and the spaces that I want and they'll stitch that right into the audio.

And that's important because if you want to do ads where you're, I mean, you can do ads a couple different ways.

You can bake them in, meaning me as the host can say, this episode is brought to you by XYZ.

And that ad will be in your media file forever.

So that's actually a really good deal.

So you may sell an ad now, but if you're your podcast for 10 years, if someone goes back and listens to that,

it's still going to be in your media file 10 years from now.

Now the one downside of doing that, and this is if you bake them in, I mean, for one, you can cost, you can charge more for that

because they are going to be there forever.

They're not just going to be there for a month.

But if they go out of business or the links change or something happens like that,

you may be sending them to a webpage. If someone goes back and listens to your second episode from three years ago,

they may see that you, that episode that link that you sent them to may not be available anymore

because the company may have gone out of business, they may have changed their link, whatever.

So that's one downside of doing the baked in ads.

So the ability to put an ad in post show is great.

And you may keep that in there forever.

You may say kind of quote, unquote, bake it in, leave it in there.

You may charge somebody more money because you're going to say, I'm going to leave this in forever.

But though you also have the ability to say, hey, for $30 a month, I will give you ad space in all of my episodes.

I can put episodes ads in all of my episodes going back to my whole catalog if I want to.

And that's nice because it's really easy and really quick.

Ad insertion, do you have the ability to do ad insertion on your podcast host?

And you may not even be doing ads right now, but down the line, you may think about that.

So that's one thing to think about.

Are your podcast hosts changing and adding new podcasting 2.0 features?

If you don't know, I've talked about it before.

Podcasting has started since 2004, 2005-ish, and just recently a group has started adding more features to podcasting such as transcripts, live episodes, value for value,

what I talked about earlier with the boostergrams, and lots, lots more.

There are some podcasting hosts out there that are starting to put these new features in to their web UI,

where you as a podcaster can start utilizing some of these new tags and these new features.

Some of them, I won't name any names, but a podcast host that I used to host with

basically said, we're not going to do that.

We're not going to integrate with any of these new tags.

And so they said, you have the ability to put a tag in advanced if you want.

You can write your own tags in there.

But who knows?

I mean, I do.

I know what tags are and how to put them in my feed because I've been doing it for a while.

I've been doing podcasting since 2007, but most people don't actually know that.

So is your podcasting host adding new features with the podcasting 2.0 initiative?

And then one other thing, a couple of other things to think about is cost.

What's it going to cost you per month to host your files there?

You know, many of these also allow you to do yearly for just a little bit cheaper.

You know, per month they break it down.

But if you pay for them for a year at a time, look at it to you a little cheaper.

And that's one of the things you need to think about because it may be worth it for you.

And a lot of times hosts will give you more things for more.

So if you want advanced stats or advanced features, they may charge a little bit more for those.

So you have to kind of break that down and figure out if it's going to be worth it for you to do that.

And then the last thing to think about is how long has your podcasting company been around?

And this is just something you have to take into consideration.

There have been podcasting hosts that have been around since 2004.

And they may or may not be integrating some of the new podcasting 2.0 apps features.

But some of them may have been around forever, which is great.

I mean, I like the fact that they've been around because they're stable.

You know that they're going to be around.

But it's just something to take into consideration because some of the new podcasting hosts may be in it for a few years

and then realize it's not financially profitable for them and they can't make money in it or whatever.

So they're going to quit.

So that's just one thing that you have to actually take into consideration when you're thinking about where to host your podcast at.

And again, I'm not saying if a podcast host has been around a year or two or whatever, that it's a bad place to be.

I'm not saying that at all.

But I am saying take into that into consideration because you may end up having to move your podcast to a different host down the road.

And they may not give you a long time to do that at all.

So what are some of the hosts that I like and why?

So I'm going to give you three hosts that I like.

And these are definitely not any means like my goats, you know, don't do any other podcasts.

I'm not saying that.

I'm saying these are my three favorite.

I've used them all or at least tried them out all out.

And so here's my top.

Actually, okay, these aren't in any order.

But the first one is going to be Captivate.

And that's my current hosts that I've used when I started out podcasting.

I use one particular host for a very, very, very long time.

And just within the last year, I switch is ad insertion.

You know, they have the ability to do the ad insertion.

So I am able to put ads and they may not even be ads.

They may just be like a pre-roll that says, Hey, everybody, I'm going to be at this conference in Dallas, Texas and the end of March.

If you want to do a meetup, we're going to do a meetup this day, this day, this day.

You can do that and put that in all of your back catalog.

And then as soon as the meetup is done, you can pull it out.

And so that's one of the reasons that I like Captivate just because they do have the ad insertion.

They are growth oriented.

They really, really, really want to help you grow your podcast.

And so they have a huge amount of tools and training that you can do all for free if you're hosting with them.

That talks to you about growing your podcast.

And so those are the reasons that I like Captivate.

I'm going to give some prices here and these prices are valid.

It is April 27th, 2023 when I'm recording this.

And they are all valid today.

But so here's the prices for Captivate right now.

It's going to be $17 a month for up to $30,000 downloads per month.

So that's a lot of downloads.

If your podcast is not getting more than $30,000 downloads, you can do their $17 a month plan.

And these are all prices if you're using the paying yearly.

If you want a little bit more downloads, you can get for $44 a month, you get $1,500 downloads.

That's a lot of downloads.

You can do unlimited podcasts.

So you can host multiple podcasts on one account.

So let's say you pay the $17 a month and you have two podcasts.

They're going to share those $30,000 downloads per month, the downloads.

So they can't collectively go over the $30,000 downloads a month.

But you can have two podcasts hosted on one podcast host on one plan.

Many other podcast hosts do not allow you to do that.

So that's one of the reasons that I like Captivate 2 because they're able to be...

You're able to host more than just one podcast.

Let's say you want to do a backup show or a different show or a post show.

You can do that.

They allow you to have unlimited uploads and storage.

So you can upload 300 episodes a month with each of those being 60 minutes or whatever.

You can upload unlimited uploads and storage per month.

It doesn't matter if that's 60 terabytes of data.

That's a lot of data, but it doesn't matter.

They count their usage based on downloads per month.

So that's one of the reasons I like it too.

Because you can do 5 episodes, 10 episodes, 30 episodes a month.

It doesn't matter how long they are or how big they are.

It just matters on the amount of downloads you get per month.

And that may be some negative for some people because that kind of limits your wanting to

grow because if you do grow, then you're going to end up having to pay more for your podcast host per month.

All right.

Move on to our next host.

Next host is Buzzsprout.

Buzzsprout is doing some really cool things.

They've been around for a little while now and they have several different plans that you can choose from.

Now, one thing with Buzzsprout is they count theirs a little bit different.

They say three hours of content published for $12 a month.

So their base plan is $12 a month for three hours of content per month.

So you do a show every other week for an hour.

That's perfect.

For $12, you get space on Buzzsprout.

You can also, if you need more, you can go $18 a month and that's up to six hours of content published a month.

And that allows you to publish six hours a month.

And then if you need to have $24 a month, you can jump up to the 12 hours of content a month.

That includes advanced stats, unlimited storage, which again, they say unlimited storage

meaning that you can upload a lot of episodes, but not all at once like you can with Captivate.

Because they base it on the hours and they can do that because they do some other things to their content.

They transcode it to be...

I like to record it at 128 kilobits stereo.

They change that down to, I forget what it is right now, I think 96K.

So not a big deal, but that's what they do.

That's how they can say up to six hours because they know how much that's going to take in their system.

With Buzzsprout, you can also do subscriptions or monthly payments, premium content.

So this is something that they just to either kind of do like a patron model where you're saying,

hey, if you want to support us, you can go in and then you can subscribe and pay a monthly amount.

Or you can also do premium content if you want.

So you can offer your people that are paying a premium episode or behind the scenes or whatever you want.

And that's really cool because it's actually handled right in any podcast player.

I mean, right now, if Apple Podcast offers a similar feature, but you have to listen to an Apple podcast.

So you can't listen anywhere else.

With Buzzsprout, you can take it anywhere to any podcast app and listen to premium content.

And then they have also what they call Magic Mastering, which they have a cost which allows you to upload a file

and they magically do something to it that makes it sound even better.

So that helps if you're not a great audio engineer and you don't necessarily record the best sounding audio.

Magic Mastering will help master that and make it have a better sounding podcast for you.

Also, they do ad insertion, pre-post and mid, either with your own content or part of their ad network.

So you can either say, I want to put in messages either pre-post or mid on your own.

Or you can say sign up for their ad network, which allows you to...

They basically sell the content out and you're basically saying, I'm going to allow you to put your own ads in,

and you put ads in and then pay me for those ads.

So it's a way to make money.

I believe anybody can do that on their system.

So check that out if that's something you want to do.

The last host that I recommend is Blueberry because they've been around for a while.

They have a $10 month plan, which you get 125 megabytes of monthly storage.

Or for $17 a month, you can get 400 meg of monthly storage.

You can monetize with programmatic ads, putting in ads.

They have their own ad network.

But at this point, I do not believe that you can go in and say you went to upload files to be inserted automatically.

It just does that.

They sell ads and put them in there.

You can tell them you don't want that or you can pick the content, the categories that you want.

But you don't have the option to do your own ads if you want.

They offer you a free WordPress site.

So that's huge.

WordPress powers a good chunk of the web right now.

WordPress is a content management system, a website creator.

And they give you a free WordPress site with every hosting thing.

So you can create it.

You can do blog posts.

You can do other stuff.

The one downside is it is managed by them.

So you can't use just whatever plugins.

They have a handful of plugins that they have on their system and those are the ones that you can use.

But it does allow you to create more content than just a page for each episode.

They also create something called a podcast media kit in which you can hand out to potential sponsors and say,

hey, look, here's our demographics.

Here's the amount of numbers, downloads we get, things like that.

One of the first companies, if not the only podcast company doing that right now,

you can also get unlimited downloads with Blueberry.

Now, links for all three of these are going to be in the show notes for this episode.

So in your podcast app, just look at the show notes or on the web page.

And now I am an affiliate for both Blueberry and Captivate.

And in the future, maybe for Buzzsprout.

And I also will maybe make a commission on any qualifying sales.

So if your sale qualifies for Blueberry or Captivate, I will make a commission on that.

But I've used several podcast hosts and I found that these three are the best ones.

And I recommend them regardless of being an affiliate.

I think that these are the three best in the industry right now.

And so these are the ones that I'm recommending to you because I do believe in them and I do host with one of them.

And I would host with any of the three because I do believe that they're great companies.

So if you do start hosting with a company though and decide that you need to move, it can be done relatively easy.

So maybe down the line, you decide that the podcast host you have is not for you.

It's really relatively simple, like I said.

Many hosts offer, the many new hosts, if you want to move to a new company will suck in your old episodes art and create their own RSS feed based on the show that you already have.

So it's relatively simple. You just tell them your current RSS feed.

They pull all of that information into their system, start hosting direct to the new feed.

What this 301 redirect does is when a app hits your old feed, it allows directories and apps to know that there is a new feed.

And then the apps will use that from now on.

So you ask them to put a 301 redirect, permanent redirect on your feed.

So anytime someone hits it, it will send them to the new feed.

Directories and apps will update to use the new feed after that.

I still recommend though that you have your own dot com domain that you can either host your own website on and that may or may not be something that you're generating your RSS feed on.

You can generate your own RSS feed with PowerPress.

But having a website that you can send people to is the best because if you do move web hosts or whatever, they may be looking for the old website.

Their bookmarks may be pointing to the old website.

And even if the companies do a temporary redirect into the new site, which they probably won't for your show notes, they won't probably do that forever.

And so I recommend having your own domain.

So you can either host it on your own website and you can get a web host and host your own content there.

Your show notes and things like that.

Or a lot of times podcast hosts will allow you to map a domain to their site that they create.

So like I said, all three of those companies that I had mentioned, Buzzsprout, Captivate and Blueberry, all offer a website that has show notes on it.

It says a little bit about your show and then each episode has their own episode page for people to go to if they want to read more or see your show notes on the web.

But many podcast hosts will also allow you to, and it may be for a fee, but will allow you to take your own dot com.

So like in this case, podcast answers and point it to their site.

So that way, when people go to it, you can just tell people to go to podcast answers.

And no matter what podcast host you're at, your domain automatically points to their thing.

So I know guys that this information can be a lot.

So if you need help getting started or growing your podcast, I am happy to help.

I do one-on-one consults. Just contact me at podcastanswers.com slash contact.

And until next time, get out, start and grow your podcast and I'll see you next Thursday.