Podcasting Basics: Why you need a podcast host

Whilst you could email MP3 files to your friends, there are better ways of sharing your podcast to a wide audience.

To give a comparison to the music world, think of a podcast host like a distributor – and in some cases a label – all rolled into one. Many provide marketing, sales representation, and also technical support to ensure your podcast runs smoothly.

At its core, podcast distribution is based on RSS technology. Developed in the 1990s for news websites, podcasters began to use the same technology to share their content in the very late 1990s, and early 2000s.

Early platforms like Libsyn (2004) and Blubrry (2005) adopted this technology and made it mainstream so that the barrier to entry for podcast distribution was lower than it ever had been.

Because of their adoption, podcasting listening platforms are also now built on top of RSS. Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Podcast Addict, Overcast – any listening destination you can think of is absorbing podcast information from an RSS feed.

Nowadays podcast hosts are jam packed full of fancy features so that you can upload your episode audio files, artwork, title, description, tags, and more. Many now have additional features such as audio editing tools, royalty free music, and website creation tools.

Ultimately using a podcast host means that you don’t have to program your own RSS feed from scratch.

Where to host your podcast

As time has gone on, the list of podcasts hosts has ever expanded into a huge multitude of options with various limitations, paid tiers, bonus features, and technical support.

There’s no one size fits all podcast host, so do your research!

Here’s a short list of podcast hosts that I’ve personally had a play around with and can recommend.

I’ve also linked off to some additional resources below which have some more expansive research on the various offerings from even more podcast platforms.

Apple have their own recommendations list for podcast platforms. I would advise taking a look at this too – https://itunespartner.apple.com/podcasts/partner-search

Here’s another great resource to do some research on what the various podcast hosts offer – https://podcasthosting.org/