Self Hosting Your Podcast?

Question

Do you self host your podcasts (the actual audio files of your podcast episodes and the feed generation) instead of using a free or paid podcast hosting service (like anchor, libsyn, transistor, blubrry)?If yes, what software do you use for hosting and where do you host the podcast software (like Digital Ocean, Linode, Hetzner, Vultr, AWS, GCP)?Any further insights and suggestions are also welcome. Most paid podcast services seem to be too low on storage quota for the monthly price that they charge (storage becomes a bigger issue when creating several hours of content every month, with no ads or sponsorship to support the costs). I looked at the "awesome self hosted" list for options, but couldn't get a good grip. [1][1]: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

saluki · Accepted Answer

Of course you could self host your podcast audio files, but if your podcast is popular you are going to run in to issues with concurrent downloads eventually.
Paid podcast hosting just makes it where you don't have to worry about a CDN, concurrent downloads, submitting to iTunes/Spotify.
If you're just getting started self hosting is probably ok, but I would look at going with paid hosting once you gain a following.
I do not have a podcast but I hear great things about transistor.fm.
You can host unlimited podcasts so there wouldn't be a storage issue.
Tiers are based on downloads per month. (That's expected to pay for bandwidth)
Good luck with your podcast.

saamm · Answer

I wrote a bad Python script that I use to encode WAV files, upload to B2, and generate an RSS feed. I host my MP3 files on Backblaze B2 and the RSS feed on GitHub pages. With my usage, I stay in B2's free tier.

cdnsteve · Answer

Kelsey hightower recently commented on hosting his own on Software Engineering Daily[1]. TLDR; spend $10 instead of spending two days unless you are wanting to understand how Podcasts technically work.[1] https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/01/06/kubernetes-p...