December 29, 2008

On Free Podcast Hosting Sites

I'm not impressed. True, the for-pay versions might not be any better, but the free ones have left me unimpressed.

My brother recommended Switchpod. It says 450MB for free unlimited transfers. For a little extra you can remove ads from your web page. Then you register and, "welcome, you have 250MB to play with." Huh? What about the 450MB? And how hard should it be to upload a 30MB mp3 file? Pretty hard. It has failed twice.

Other sites offer archiving... that is, you get 100MB per month of fast access space, then your old episodes are "archived" to slower access storage. The storage is unlimited, but the download transfers are limited. So, hopefully your podcast won't get too popular. Huh? OK I can live with that for starters, the only problem is the sites don't work that well.

Take Libsyn.com for example. Liberated Syndication. They have this cool feature called the "Sandbox." You login: sandbox, with password: sandbox, and presto! you're able to test out their system. Only problem is, it isn't too hot. Images fall off the page. Setting the look/feel of the web page didn't work for me. Uploading a podcast file ... got uploaded, but then I wasn't able to do anything with it. Not impressed.

So, what about MyPodcast.com? Looked good. Nice clean web pages. Player right on the page, with option to download and many options for subscribing. Comments. A place for adding links. Now the down-side. They embed an audio ad in each of your podcasts... that's maybe OK if they are just advertising the free podcast hosting, but it's probably more than that. The on-screen player didn't seem to work... it worked once, but that was it.

Then there is podserver.info/. Doesn't accept Yahoo e-mail accounts. Maybe that's a good thing, but I didn't want to give my other personal e-mail, so had to set up a Gmail account. OK...

So, I continue to search and ponder the $4/month option.

Update:

Finally went with GoDaddy, bought a URL and use a service called Quick Blogcast. Works fairly well. Still thinking about going into my own website.

Psssst... Do Something

Sources:

gdaeman_scroll_small

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am the admin of Pod Server. Actually we do accept Yahoo e-mail accounts. As far as personal information we only ask for the bare minimum amount of information required. Our services are intended for web hosting not for podcasts.

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