Podcast Hosting: Own your RSS Feed
After using the weekend to understand podcast hosting and RSS feeds, I come to the following conclusion:
The best solution that keeps you in control is
đď¸hosting your media outside at a reliable host
đď¸owning your own RSS feed
That's what I'll doâ¤ď¸
Do you own your own RSS feed?
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You always âownâ your feed regardless of who hosts it, itâs 10 seconds to switch providers if you want to. Hosting your own feed is a pain, and not for most people. Chances are youâll break more things than save money, unless youâd like to get really good at hosting... at which point you might as well offer that as an option to others, and sell membership :)
That's not correct. First, I'm talking about owning the RSS feed. That's the XML file that keeps all your episodes and points your subscribers towards where they can find the files. I'm not talking about hosting the files yourself. This, I said, should be done by a reliable provider. What I'm talking about has nothing to do with saving money ;-)
It's about staying in control!
If you make the RSS feed of your podcast host public (instead of your own), then you have to switch that once you switch providers. Yes, you can update this for each service, even automatically, but all people that are directly subscribed to your feed are left out.
Some providers offer to set a redirect to your new RSS feed file, but not all do.
If you own your RSS feed, you can choose whatever hosting provider you want, and switch easily. Otherwise, it depends.
We are looking at podcasts hosts right now as we will be launching 2 podcasts shortly and this thread has been very helpful. I was looking at anchor.fm because it's free. What should I ask them or check to get our best options? Not sure of the language
ALSO
How does someone set up a paid rss feed like Sam Harris ( he's set up a separate feed that is paid and another that is free.
Sorry about the dumb questions,
This is something that I was really worried about when launching All Things Auth. However, I was overwhelmed and had so much information overload from all of the other aspects of launching the show that I was falling into analysis paralysis. I decided to launch using transistor.fm and having them host my RSS feed. I plan to revisit that in the future and host the RSS feed on my own so that I have complete control, but life is busy and I simply don't have time to keep up with creating new content and work on the website since this is a side project at the moment. Creating new content wins over everything else, so the website and RSS feed and other things I want to improve do not get the attention they deserve right now.
Totally understandable! I also now went with a half baked approach of redirecting my url to the hosting rss just because I could not find a tool that I trusted enough to handle the RSS feed generation.
At SE Radio we host our own RSS feed using a wordpress plugin and the content is hosted on libsyn.
Using a managed host's RSS feed is fine if they have an option to redirect the feed if you leave.
The great thing about podcasts being RSS is that it's up to you đ
Thanks that was my plan too. Now I just redirect because itâs means I have to worry less.