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How to Avoid Problems With Podcast Hosting

Published Thursday, August 21, 2008 by bloggerblognet83280 | E-mail this post

The beauty of podcast technology is the fact that it uses existing standards and protocols. Rather than a proprietary protocol to host its files, podcast hosting uses the same hosting server that is used to host any web pages and files. It doesn't mean that you can use your hosting accounts interchangeably though, unless your server has the power, bandwidth and disk space to support both podcasts and web sites.

The difference is, podcasts consume more disk space and bandwidth to transfer to the end users. On the other hand, scripts and web applications require more processing power than bandwidth. A web page may average between a few Kilobytes to 100KB. It is small in size but to produce the page requires queries to the database and a lot of computation. But after it, even on a dial-up connection, the page will load quite briefly.

Transferring huge files needs lower computation power, but a lot of bandwidth. Unless your server is connected to fast network, chances are it will be the bottleneck.

There is nothing wrong in using standard web hosting for podcasts if the account has enough bandwidth to handle the transfers. Especially in crowded shared hosting environment, it can be a problem when many podcast subscribers try to download at the same time. It is important that you read the terms of use or user agreement before signing up with a hosting company.

Although the product description offers hundreds of gigabytes worth of disk space and terabytes of monthly bandwidth, some hosting explicitly disallow hosting multimedia files. Others will delete accounts without warning even only after using half of the limit in the running month.

Hosting is also known to limit your bandwidth usage by placing a ceiling on the processing power usage, for example. There are tricks you should be aware of before signing up with a hosting company.

Unfortunately, there is no way you can guarantee this problem will never happen to you, especially if you use a shared server. So do you own due diligence, even if the company offers podcast specific hosting packages. If your podcast is important for your business, it is worth a good home.

Do you want to learn more about podcast creation and marketing? Have you considered podcasts as part of your business and marketing mix but are confused about the strategy?

Download your free 3-step podcasting guide and business case for podcasting from http://podcastingscout.com/subscribe

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