Hosting a Podcast

The first step in hosting a podcast is actually locating a place to store the mp3 files you’ve recorded for the audience to listen to. Hosting can be done where your website is hosted as long as you have sufficient storage and bandwidth. A typical one hour podcast mp3 file will be 38MB is size. Depending on how many listeners you have it could potentially exceed your monthly bandwidth allocation. Unlike blogs, calendars, and even videos on YouTube, there aren’t available free mp3 storage solutions. We’ve found several low cost hosting options with very large storage and bandwidth features. Our favorite is Brinkster.

The next step is to generate an rss feed. Feeds are a way for websites large and small to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email. Feeds also make it possible for site content to be packaged into "widgets," "gadgets," mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news/sports/weather/whatever headlines just about anywhere. For ChurchOfTheRiver.org we generate our own feed.xml file for complete control of the content. It is very simple though to create a feed using Google’s blogger. Simply tell the blog that it is a podcast and you can add the link to the mp3 file hosted in the first step.

Feedburner owned by Google is a great tool to publish your feed in multiple formats including iTunes. There are many benefits to using feedburner including statistics, advertising, and branding to name a few.

Adding your podcast to your site can be done by using any of the Feedburner or blogger tools. We’ve custom formatted the podcast on the ChuchOfTheRiver site and the SternCardio site using Google’s feed application programming interface, javascript, and cascading style sheets. Google has exceptional documentation and several cookie cutter solutions to add feeds to your site but none is easier than just embedding the hyperlink to your Feedburner feed.