 Podcasters round table round one, oh three podcast media hosting 2017 slash 18. Cause you know, we're doing this at the very end of the year. It's November middle of November. So this should still apply. Last time we talked about this, I looked it up was 2013. There's possible we've talked about it in between then and now it's, it's a popular topic, but we're going to talk a little bit about, um, where we might recommend you host media files or basically go on our own experiences of looking at different hosts and using different hosts. Um, thinking about that, let's, well, let's introduce the round table. First, first new round table or first time, Chris, welcome to the round table. I am very happy to be here. Um, my name is Chris Nessie. I host the house of ed tech podcast on christenessi.com. And my podcast is for teachers to better integrate technology into their classrooms. Uh, and along with that, by day, I am a high school social studies teacher. Yeah, that's awesome. You know how it's done here. He gave the name and his podcast. So that's perfect. Emily in the chat, she's here. She's always here, but she's always here. And she's saying, I don't have my normal ATR 2100, which I haven't done for a long time. So I'm not sure where she, she has been here. I know she's been here. But, um, anyways, that that was funny. No, I'm not hand holding the ATR. If you're listening to this, this is a different microphone. Daniel, welcome back. Thank you. I'm eager to talk about this year's model of podcast hosting, or at least what matters most recently with podcast hosting. This year's model. Yeah. What, what do we, uh, I don't know if we have a new model. It's like the old car that's just keeps coming out again and again. But I think, I think we can actually add a few new features to that. The podcast hosting XP, XP, there you go, XP, Dave Jackson. Welcome back. Yeah, Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting.com. I think we can definitely steer some people in the right direction today. Should be fun. Very cool. All right. So I wanted to start, uh, at the beginning co-figure Chris looks like he's gone all of a sudden. So our, our wonderful live streaming, um, this is what happens, but we will, Daniel, where did you first host your podcast? I first hosted my media on my own shared web hosting account. I had no idea that I should do anything different. Sure. I just knew I'm paying for my web hosting. So they have an allowance for so many gigabytes of media files. I'll go ahead and use that. Right. Exactly. And Dave, when you started back in the day. What were you, well, it was a long time ago. So what were you looking for? What did you know you needed and how to find it? I think I'm with Daniel. I think I was using my very first few episodes were on my, my web host. And I was, you know, I was using, I was hand coding my RSS feed. And I don't know that, uh, I had found, uh, Lipson yet. But once I did, that's, that's where I moved to. But I think of like the first couple of episodes until I had heard about Lipson and just the fact that, uh, I think at the time, Dan class had been featured on the, uh, the New York times website. And he was hosting his files on his, his own website. And it just caused all sorts of problems. We started getting popular. And that's when it was like, hmm, we need a new solution. And about that time is when Lipson showed up. Yeah. That was going to ask you, what made you make the switch? Uh, basically that just people were, you know, getting these weird bills and things of that nature. And, uh, so it was just when it was like, well, I don't want to have a problem with that. So, um, you know, I moved. Chris, I'm asking, I'm asking everyone where they first hosted their audio. Where did you go to first to host your audio? Oh, well, naturally, uh, I started with hosting. Got a USB issue. It sounds like, uh, maybe unplug and re-plug your USB microphone. It's just crackling up for us a little bit here. He kind of sounded like he was gargling. That's always fun. Yeah. It's the, it's the classic USB sound, the crackle. Testing, testing. Nope. Try again. Uh, Daniel, when you, what made you make you switch, make the switch off of your, uh, hosting it down your own website? It was recognizing that I was about to start a podcast that I anticipated would probably be very popular. And I already knew by the time that I was switching, or I think it was, uh, 2011 when I switched. So after I'd started the audacity to podcast, I knew that I was basically risking everything and I was on a timer almost to, at some point, the gig would be up and I would be contacted by my web host and told to move stuff off. And, uh, so when I was starting my TV show fan podcast, I anticipated it would get tens of thousands of downloads, it did reach thousands, but then went down after season two. But because of that coming up, I knew there's no way that hosting on the shared server is going to stand up to all of the media requests for this show, in addition to all of the media requests for all of the other shows that I was hosting at that time. How, how do we know that? Like, do we know people who've been booted? Because I know a lot of people, they do this successfully, successfully as a, as, as an interesting term, but lots of people host on their own website and never have an issue from their host or anything. Uh, I know, uh, well, I know Dan class. I know, oh, I forget his name, but it's sex, drugs and rock and roll. He was a guy that was hosting on his website. I've known a couple. I don't remember the names, but those are two that, that definitely had issues where they just got super popular. And I've talked to blue host and host skater and a bunch of other sites. And, and I always thought it was a bandwidth issue and it's not. It's, it's a resource issue so that when all of a sudden, and that's the, that's the number I couldn't get. Like what's, what's too popular to be on a web host as your media host, and they wouldn't give me one, but when you have hundreds of people grabbing that file at the same time, the server just, you know, runs out of, of strength or whatever. It's too, it's too taxing on the, on the resources. I think what happens is when they have a shared hosting server, there are thousands of websites running on one machine. And if a bunch of those websites start using too many resources because they're all using and pulling from the same shared pool of resources. If a few of those start spiking, then the web hosting company either personally looks at it or maybe they have some algorithms in place to try and find out, okay, who is using more than their fair share of all of these shared resources. We need to contact these people. So you might see like someone with a very unpopular podcast gets taken down because they are on one of those servers that's already overloaded and they just so happen to be in that higher threshold where they need to be contacted. Whereas someone else who has a much more popular podcast might be on a server that almost everyone else on the server is barely using their website. And so that one person is getting the huge portion of the resources on that server, at least for now. So it, because it's so fluid like that, I think that's why there's no hard rule and why we see it so inconsistently enforced with people because it really depends on what are the resources on their server. Yeah. And I've talked to a couple of different hosts before too. And I've asked them about this. And it is, you know, they say the resource, right? They, they sure advertise unlimited bandwidth. And this is more for a website, like website traffic. But when you start burning up the CPU on their server, then they do come to you. And I had this actually happen with my, I wasn't hosting my audio, but my feed appeared to be creating this issue. So have you guys heard of that happening before? I did, well, this was years ago. The school of podcasting used to be hosted on HostGator. And for whatever reason, I could not log into the school of podcasting into the back end of WordPress. And I kept trying and trying. And my website was real. I had people saying, when I go to your website, it doesn't even load. It was just, and so there was, I don't know if it was a denial of service attack or what, but there was a lot of things going on. And so I was on the live chat with HostGator and they said, if you can log in, the first thing you need to do is go to your bandwidth report and see what's chewing up the most bandwidth. And what I did, it was my RSS feed. So I don't know if that's what was causing it, but at the time that was the thing was using up the most bandwidth. So that's when I switched and moved my feed over to Lipson. Yeah, I did the same thing because I feel like, I feel like I was having an issue. WordPress is attacked constantly. If you install the right plug-in, you'll see how many people are trying to break into your website. And it seems almost inevitable that this is going to happen to you if you have a WordPress site, but I think one time they got in or did something to my website, essentially, and I had to have it fixed. And I don't think I ever really recovered from that. And no host could figure it out. No one could really ever put the nail in the coffin and figure out what the problem was. And the feeds appeared to be drawing, whether it was fake hits to the feed. It didn't matter. Something was just constantly hitting these feeds. And in fact, Feedburner looked like it was causing this issue at one point. It was doing this really weird thing where all the URLs were coming from Feedburner. So the point is, you know, this is, I'm dancing around the inevitable conversation about hosting your feed on your website. We won't go there because we're talking about podcast media hosting, but I ran to this too. So I also went to Lipson at that point, but I started podcast media hosting. I did the free thing too, except I didn't do it on my own website. I went to blip.tv, which had a little hack that it was a video site, but you could host your audio there. And once that went away, I think even before then what happened for me was that I noticed that the downloads first five megabytes blazing fast. And then it just crawled, didn't matter. It was audio just crawled to a halt when you started downloading anything over five megabytes. So trying to get a 20 meg or, you know, I was probably doing 128 kilobits per second at that point. And it was, you know, 80 megs or something. And it would take forever someone download. And this is back in the day when you actually mower people downloaded the episode. Right. That may happen while you're sleeping or something, but a lot of times people will click download, put it on their device and it takes forever. Um, less consumption that way these days, but still happens. As in manually downloading, you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Or even if your iTunes did it for you and you're just happened to be there and, you know, trying to get the episode just would take forever. Um, which I think was part of the problem of video podcasts. Once HD hit and beyond hosting. So we know video is podcast as well, uh, hosting video files. Well, that literally has to be broken off into a separate round table, I think, because that's a whole different issue. But I don't know that there's a good solution for that. There's a couple. Impossible solutions, but anyways, we'll stick to audio. Uh, so yeah, I think that most podcasters try to start off doing it for free. I mean, we're, it's a hobby. It's something you're just trying for a lot of people. Uh, and they just want to put together the pieces that get them started, probably the lowest, like barrier to entry, but you can see that, that all of us moved away from that at some point, uh, because that created, they could get created issues. Well, and that in trying to get stats from your website was always tricky. Right. So you can add those in now, right? Yeah. I mean, if you were, well, now you could pass through blue barrier or something. Yeah. Yeah. For free or pod track. Yeah. But back then that didn't exist. So that was a fun part. Way, way back then. When Dave started, wasn't a thing. But, uh, yeah. So anyways, I'm also curious, and we've lost Chris, unfortunately, I don't know where he's at, but, um, what, what are some of the requirements now? I actually do. I'll kind of want to wait on this because Alex may join us. Um, can you, Daniel, why did you pick? Wait, where are you hosting, Daniel? Now I, I'm a customer of both camps of both blueberry and Libsyn. I host both. That's good. Yeah. And they're both great. They, they continue to be on the top of the list, but we'll talk more about companies in a little bit, but, uh, I host most of my shows on Libsyn, but I actually like the stats from blueberry better. So I pay for both hosting on Libsyn and I pay for premium stats from blueberry. Okay. So why do you like the hosting better on Libsyn? What's it doing for you specifically as a host? Well, I host multiple shows in a single account and Dave is probably rolling right now or wanting to roll over that. But, uh, that Libsyn gives the most bane for the buck in terms of megabytes per dollar or dollars per megabyte, whatever, whatever way it ends up working out. I think I have an addition, a new one to add into that. When we get to specific hosts, I think, I think someone else can do it better, but we'll talk about that. Cause I used to do that too. I used to roll all my shows in one count. That caused a lot of problems at one point. Well, yeah, and it can definitely cause problems if I was looking to Libsyn for all of my stats, because then I would see all the stats mixed together. I wouldn't be able to use the Libsyn feed. Well, I can't use the Libsyn feed right now, but that's fine. I, I don't, I use power press to generate my feeds, but I like blueberries premium stats because I can split them out. Even though I have all of my media hosted in one central location under one account, under one show quote show inside of Libsyn power press is splitting out the separate feeds and blueberry is giving me the separate stats. Dave, how did you, Dave works for Libsyn, but he didn't eat. He hosted first. So Dave, why did you, well, you, I think you kind of looted to it. It's kind of what was available on blueberry started, but not probably soon, not too much after. Yeah. But I, my primary ones are lips and in blueberry. I have a couple of shows on blueberry. And then I have one show on pod bean. I have one show on Spreaker. Yeah, Dave, Dave does the hard work of trying out all these things for us. And, uh, so, and then I, I have a bunch of others that I've tried, but it's, that's, I think that's something I'm not going to do next year because, you know, we've just mentioned a bunch here that are fine. And so why am I wasting my time to go, yeah, these aren't as good, you know, these other companies have 10 years, you know, eight years of experience. Why am I testing some poor guy in the basement who's got, you know, six months into it. Uh, and Pat Flynn is doing this series right now during the month of November, 2017, a series of episodes talking about affiliate programs on smart passive income. And one of the things that really stood out to me in one of his first episodes about being an affiliate, as he said, have only one recommendation. And that's something that sticks out in, to me, especially because I tend to be the very, very targeted recommendation, you know, I say, if you want something that's WordPress focused, use this host. If you want something that standalone, use this. If you want this feature, then use that because I want to help you make the right decision. I'm just, I'm not going to just say this one host is the only hosting company I recommend by them and make them work for you. And maybe that hurts a little bit with the affiliate stuff. But when it comes to like what Dave is saying with all of these other potential things, I don't need another recommendation to give my audience. While someone may be a little cheaper, sure, they're probably going to be lacking in a bunch of other things, which we'll probably get to in a moment. And the same thing goes with microphones too. As, as podcast geeks, you know, we might be tempted to review the latest microphone. I just recorded a review of a microphone today. And I think it comes back to, well, is this really something that we want to suggest? Or is it just yet another thing to review and test and be informed with? Yeah, I mean, I can see with the recommendation for the one stop shop, I guess one. I guess Amazon gives you more, the upper percentage, if you get an X amount of people sent there in a month or something like that. But that to me is just is bad. It's bad business because I guess it's good business, but it's bad customer service because I like to tailor stuff for what people actually need. Right. That's why I always tell people, don't buy a package of stuff for your podcast. Like let me know what you're trying to do. And I'll let you know what you actually need. And that may be, that may be more or less and you can spend less a lot of times. So yeah, I anyways, get a whole, we've done affiliates. No, I don't know if we've done affiliate marketing on this show. I feel like we've done something like that. We've talked about monetization. Yeah. Affiliate stuff comes up here and there. Definitely. It's a big one. I mean, we're all, we all have affiliates. I think everyone, every podcaster I think should have some type of an affiliate relationship just because you, this is classic round table. We can fall down any, any side, any side or have it all year. But you're going to be sending people to someone else's products by virtue of you talking about something could be a book. Amazon's going to have most of those and not everyone can do Amazon. If there's an affiliate that you use and like and trust and that is actually the best price for somebody, you should sign up because you're going to send a lot of money to someone. They should have to give you a little bit for your influence. So, you know, it gets, it gets sort of, some people think it's dirty when you use an affiliate. They think you're influenced. But I think that comes down to knowing the podcaster. Like if you don't trust me, then you haven't spent enough time interacting with me or vice versa. You know, you don't know me. And as a podcaster, as you listen, you get to know somebody. So if you don't trust the person that you're listening to every week, maybe there's a bigger issue there. Daniel, you look like you want to say something. Yeah. And since you're mentioning affiliates and we're about to get into sharing some specific podcast hosting company names, do recognize that all three of us and maybe others who might join us if they're able to reconnect are affiliates of different companies. And here's the thing that we are probably all affiliates of more companies than we actually recommend. And that we became affiliates of these companies because we recommend them, not the other way around. Yeah, it's always that way. I always try to stress that. I'm like, the reason I'm affiliate is because I've used it. I use this myself or I recommend it because I use the service. So yeah, it's weird. I feel like we always have to have all these disclaimers because there's a lot of people who abuse that system and abuse that trust. Right. And affiliates, I mean, people have had, you know, you had websites of click farms, affiliate link paid like has a long history of abuse. So but I think, again, I think the unique nature of podcasting is that it's a little more intimate. You get to know the host and hopefully you can trust the person that you give an hour a week to or whatever. And if not, I don't know, maybe reach out, have a conversation with them, get to know them a little better, but probably on the podcaster to to to figure out how to earn that trust better. And that's the key. If you're sending people to garbage stuff, you know, you lose that they're gone, you know, you lose that trust. So that's that's a lot worse than, you know, a few more cents commission you're going to make on a one time click. All right, we'll get off that one. We'll return to hosting our media. Unfortunately, Chris is not back. So I don't know, Dave, if you can ping him, see if you know what's up. But I'd like to get you back in here, Chris. What's next, if we go from our first host to where we ended up, I think that we're all pretty much at the same place that we, you know, we migrated to what we consider to be good hosts, whether it's Lipson or Blueberry, that's the two in this case that you've heard of. There are more, Dave, you used to keep, I feel like you used to keep a running list of like requirements for podcast hosts. Like what you can you tell us? Yeah, what was the number one thing that you here's the thing when I do mixer reviews, I look at the preamp. And if the preamp sucks, we're done with the review. Like we just don't go past that. So for you with podcast hosting, what's the first thing? What's the one thing you look at that if you don't get passed? If they don't have that, you're out unlimited back catalog. So give me unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, because if that's not there, I'm done, you know, some of these places. It's like, I did not think that's what you were going to say, by the way. Well, there's a bunch. I mean, I used to say, don't mess with my file. What I upload is what I want people to download. And I still believe that. But as we inch closer and closer to having dynamic ads be like just a general option, what's probably going to be for everybody in the next couple of years, that's going to be very hard to maintain because when they're injecting ads into your file, I'm pretty sure they're not going to keep your file name. Go back, though. You said unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth. Right. That seems counter to what you actually believe in. So would you just for everyone else who doesn't know what you're thinking? Well, what I explain is storage specifically. A little storage means, yeah, I see what you mean. So let's say I get 400 megs a month at the end of the month. I want another 400 megs so that it just every month I get more and more and more storage. So in the end, that's why I have whatever, 590 some episodes now because every month I get more storage where there are some companies that you get X amount of space and when that's full, you're done. You got to start deleting old episodes or upgrade your account or upgrade of your account. Yeah. So I have I can for me, at least I just keep uploading a certain amount every month and then it doesn't matter if I have, you know, 10 downloads or 10,000 or 10 million. I have one fee so I can put that into the budget. All right, Daniel, what would be your your your deal breaker? Like you're from the beginning. Well, these days with iOS 11 out, if you're going to use a media host to also generate your RSS feed, then actually, I would say even a media host, if you're even if you're not going to use them to generate your RSS feed, because this indicates their awareness of the podcasting industry. If they don't fully support the new iTunes tags that were released with iOS 11 with seasons, episode titles, episode numbers, episode types, that kind of stuff, if they don't fully support that, they're off my list. Right from the beginning. Also, neither one of you mentioned. Well, this is the one you're probably thinking about. Go ahead. If they don't let me redirect my fee. Yeah, yeah, which is it's just kind of been the standard I feel like for a long time, like if they don't let you do that. And this used to be, where have we seen this happen? Oh, man. Well, right now opinion. Um, what was the other one? There was another app that just went kaput sound cloud back in the day. Made this difficult, if not possible. I know we can, we can talk like a blog talk made this hard, but I would say both of those have amended that, right? It's easier now if you're on both of those services to do that. So don't, don't take that as you can't do that on those services. Yeah. Um, pod being, I have a link so that once you log in, I'll send you this link and it'll take you to a page where you can put in your redirect. So. Padango for a long, very long time seemed like they didn't offer a 301, but I'm sorry, not Padango. They're gone. So yeah, they don't offer a 301, but, uh, automatic. That's what I meant. Yeah. Uh, for a long time, they didn't offer a 301. You had to add in an iTunes tag, upgrade your account so you could add this custom tag, but then that would only affect the Apple apps and a couple other apps. It wouldn't take all of your subscribers, but someone recently said, uh, when I brought this up in a conversation, I think in a Reddit group, uh, someone said, no, Potomac does now allow you to place a 301 redirect on your feed. So that's one that I never got total confirmation, like a screenshot or anything like that, but that's one that may now offer that finally. Cause the last time it used to be in their help file, it said, we offer 301 redirects, but you had to be a premium member. So in some cases, if you were on the free account, you had to upgrade and you had to make sure not to make this mistake. When you went over to upgrade, they would try to sell you the yearly price and you'd have to go down and get the monthly price, which was like $10 a month, do that, put in your redirect and let it sit there for a month and then you could go back to the free plan. So it was one of those little, you had to be kind of, uh, careful because number one, it looks like it wasn't possible if you were on a free account and then you had to upgrade. And that was the one that I always thought was kind of cheesy that they tried to sell you the yearly plan. You had to click a special box and say, no, show me my monthly pricing. So that's why I wasn't a huge fan, still not a huge fan of Potomatic. I thought that was kind of slimy. Ah, at the moment, quote, we offer redirects for our pro users only. Potomatic will issue a HTTP 301 redirect at the user's request. So yes, they do, but only at pro level. What's pro level? So if you, if you want to leave and you're on basic, let's say pro is 832 a month, if you pay annually. So it's $100 a month and $99 a year. I mean, so if you're on the basic, you have to upgrade to paid if you want to take your audience, it doesn't matter. Like that's one of those things worth paying for at that point. Like it sucks that they're doing that to you, but at least there's an option to get out. I don't, you know, I wouldn't go there for one of those reasons alone. They're strong. I mean, you're, they're holding your, your feed for ransom at that point. So that's pretty lame, but at least there's an option. Sometimes you can be on a host, want to move and forget it. It's not happening. They won't change it for you. I don't know how many of those exist anymore, but Jeffrey Jerome in the chat. Now we, oh, so it looks like Dave Jackson answered in the chat. He was asking, why direct your feed? And I don't want to fall too far down that hole, but Dave, you said, because your host is not good or they go out of business, we've certainly seen that happen, right? A host go out of business before. Yeah. Every time you turn around, it's, you know, they're, they're a bunch of them. Pudango, I know Daniel mentioned them. Um, I had a list here somewhere. Um, Pudango, a wild voice lasted 36 months. Podshow and Mevio, they lasted longer, but they also went through $39 million. Uh, my podcast lasted 48 months. You know, so every time you turn around, uh, you know, especially in almost all those cases, it was free media hosting. So yeah, yeah, free as we've heard is not a good business model. So blab, blab dot TV, blab, there you go. Blip, blip, blip, yeah. All right, P. Um, what's another thing on your list must have. Uh, obviously I want support, you know, so, and, and the other thing I think that's just weird is I, I actually want to pay for the hosting because I've seen the fact that when it's free media hosting, it doesn't stay in business. Then then the last thing I guess I would want, uh, is stats, some side of stats to let me know, you know, how many people are downloading and where they're coming from and things of that nature. Uh, so I can figure out if my audience likes my show or not, preferably accurate would be, would be even better. That is a tricky thing. Like who's to say it was accurate, but the IAB I guess now these days, if we trust it, uh, Chris, welcome back. It's good to be here. Awesome. Hey, um, we're just talking about what we require, things that we like to see in a podcast host, uh, before we recommend it. Uh, I'm curious from you, I think are you hosted on Lipson as well? Box, he's a black box. We lost him. He's gone. Was there. Bizarre, you know, his, his image looks really close crystal clear. So it makes you think the bandwidth is fine, but maybe he just needs to lower it. And I don't know, Chris, if you can hear this, lower your band with, as soon as you get in, um, I think he's a hosting at Lipson too, but I was curious why he went there. And you know, I think a lot of people, a lot of people, if you're listening to this show, you listen to us. So that's a big responsibility. And we tend to recommend those two for a long time. Lipson, blueberry have been my strongholds for reasons they've been around since almost the beginning. They're in the community. That's one I really like to see. I can talk to the people who work there. I heck, I can have him be a co-host on my show. But that's, that started before Dave worked at Lipson. But, um, you know, I know these, these people, uh, that helps a lot. And they do a podcast specific, right? They're not, uh, you know, SoundCloud is a music. Service that decided to offer, uh, media hosting for podcasts. And really, I think the only reason, you know, I used to say, or told you I used to use blip, they were a video host, like a YouTube. They weren't really set up to just be an audio only place, but I was able to do that. Uh, and you know, I don't think SoundCloud, the only thing that makes them, you know, they host audio, but they added in some type of a feed. Uh, I don't think it probably doesn't have those iTunes tags, right, Daniel? Yeah, no, they'll probably never have them. Just like feed burner will probably never have the new tags. Yeah. So, you know, they added it as like a, as like a flashy add on and a lot of people partly based off of influential recommendations in, I don't know if I'd say this community, but in podcasting made that recommendation and there's so many people. And I think a lot of people go there because it's super cheap to get us to get a lot. You can upload a lot of stuff, uh, for like a yearly plan. It's probably like a hundred bucks. And it's basically just like throw all you want at it. I don't remember what it is, but I think that's why a lot of people went there, even surprisingly big shows, right? I mean, I don't know if we know any off the top of our head, but you'd be surprised who hosts there and their big shows. I know for a while, Gimlet was using them and I was like, oh, I can't believe that. And they have since changed, but I was always blown away that they were using SoundCloud because, you know, the kind of numbers those guys are pulling down. And I was like, that's, that's painful when they're probably paying $15 a month. And part of me thinks that, you know, because podcasting, because anyone can do it and get involved, people just don't know. Like we even, we all, we all mentioned that we just did it on our own. We did a free service or we did it on our own in the beginning because we didn't know, we weren't sure. And we found something that worked sort of Chris messaged us separately. And he said that when he started, he was on Google Drive, but then he learned from us and he switched over to Libsyn. Oh, cool. So I see Chris, hopefully he stays around. He, although his, his smile is frozen, like he's already gone. Lower your bandwidth. I'm really hoping to be here. Awesome. Lower that bandwidth if you have to. I don't know what it is, but hey, so I'm assuming that Daniel was referring to you, that Chris, you're on Google Drive and what happened? Um, my show started to grow and free was not for me at that point. Yeah. Were you, was it, what was the limitation? I don't know what the limitation was. All I know is that when people were subscribing and downloading, I started to get messages from people saying, Hey, I'm subscribed. I know you put out an episode. I can't get it. So I guess while Google never said you can't, they never said you could. So I was like, I want to grow this show. I want to do this. So I went over to Lipson, of course. Interesting. Interesting. You know, I think that we've seen similar things. People have tried and was on S3 and they've run into huge bills when they woke up in the morning. Right, Dave? Yeah. The last time I, I tried them for a little bit and my last bill was $40, which was, you know, it's not going to break the bank, but compared to, you know, 15 or 20 for Lipson. I was like, okay, that's enough of this experiment. Cause every, every month it was going up because people find your show and then they go and download the back catalog and you're paying for every one of those downloads. So it started off really cheap. My first bill was like a dollar 20. And I was like, this is awesome. And like seven months later, it's like 40 bucks. I'm like, okay, that's enough of this experiment. So. And that's the big issue is you don't know. You don't know what you're going to get. Right. And so you, you know, you get that Oprah effect that we talk about and you wake up and you find out your shows on the front page of iTunes and it's exploded. Um, you know, or you're listening to a noteworthy and you have unbelievable number of downloads because you're a new noteworthy. Then you're going to get a huge pill. Uh, Dave, Dave muted himself. I thought he was going to have uncontrollable laughter. Don't mute yourself, Dave. Uh, no, he was muting the vomiting sounds. That's why he was muted. Oh my God. No, leave that in. That's good stuff. Uh, threw myself off a drop box. Can I use drop box? No. Well, Daniel is he sighed, but he kind of his, his sigh was an indication that maybe, maybe I could, you can't. It's, it's one of those things. Again, you're hacking the system. And it's not designed at all for that kind of thing. And so the hosting may work, but it's, it's weird to try and work with as it is, and it just doesn't work well. That's the other thing. Like some podcast apps don't work well. If there's a question mark in the URL, and guess what? Drop box URLs for media files, even if you change them to force the download, which you have to do to work with podcasting. And many podcasters don't realize that if it still has a question mark in it. And so that doesn't work with all of the podcast apps. And besides that, the hosting requirements just aren't that good. And this has nothing to do with the public folder that some people panicked over. This is about getting those public URLs for the individual files. Yeah. And I mean, if you didn't understand half of what Dan just said, it should be enough reason to know, I don't want to bother with that. There are issues there that are going to make things just a pain. And, you know, I always try to tell people, just try to get it done right the first time. These are things you don't want to have to deal with 20, 50, 100 episodes down the road. You really don't. I mean, that goes with the website, goes with anything. But if you can set yourself up to be successful and have your show, the technical parts, if those can run by themselves after you set them up practically, that's, it's going to be real. Um, it's going to help a lot because, you know, we know podcasting showing up every week or whatever your schedule is, that's tough. And you don't have to go and, you know, deal with all this stuff. And that's part of my issue with WordPress, but I still use it. So, uh, let's see, what else? What are some other, now Chris, you haven't tried anything else, right? Oh, once I went from Google Drive, it was, it was Lipson. I am using another one for a separate podcast that I do. I'm using another one called Pippa. OK. .io. They are free. Well, they started as free and now they offer paid options. I don't pay because I got in when they were brand new. So they said, you can continue to use our service for free. Um, so I don't pay, but it's for a smaller show that I do that's still in the world of education. Um, if in the next year or so it ever came to the point where I would have to move it, it wouldn't be that hard because the website I'm using for that show is self-hosted WordPress based. Um, and I'm using the simple podcast press plugin to generate stuff for that show. Um, so I borrowed from you guys to experiment with different shows that I do. Cool. Yeah, I'm curious what, what made you try that one? Cause it's free and you'd want to add a new show. It's free. I'm doing it with two people and, you know, being teachers, we're not always ready to pony up the money. Uh, and I didn't want to do it myself. So that was a conversation I had with my co-host. I let them know upfront, here's what we're doing. It's not going to cost us anything now. It might, but for now we'll, we'll do what we can for no cost. And that's a tough place to be in, in podcasting, because as much as we usually say, oh, you need to go with this company. You need to do this and such. There are many people out there thinking, great, I can't afford that at all. And I know it's important to invest in what you're doing. And it's important to have the perspective that you can't change the world. You can't reach an audience unless you're willing to invest something in it. But still, when you're just starting out, I understand that frustration that you don't have any money. Maybe you spend all of it just to get the website hosting or your domain or your microphone or anything like that. And then that's kind of where there's this situation of having to make a bad decision. Do you think someone should wait? Should they save? I mean, what's the minimum, you know, because you pay generally by the, the the megabyte that you, as you Chris is going crazy. What's up, Chris? No, I was going to say just coming at it from as a teacher and promoting podcasting to students K through 12 and also at the collegiate level and trying to also promote it to other teachers as something to do. My big motto is just hit record because I mean, Dave, you talk about planning the plan of the plan, et cetera, et cetera. And when I talk about starting a podcast with other people, I always try and I do preach it to them, you know, just hit record. It doesn't have to be perfect, you know, especially with students and again people, even if you're an adult, that you're not ready to make the investment, go through the process, you know, even go ahead, record some audio, put it on a SoundCloud. If you're a student, try and anchor, see what it's like in the work it takes to create the content. And as you guys say, you know, your first podcast may not be your best one, but it'll give you, you know, the blood, sweat and tears to cut your teeth and maybe create that next show where you're ready to make the investment in the hardware, the software, the hosting, the website. But I think to lower that barrier of entry, it's important, let's get more people to just hit record. And I agree, I say it all the time, just start like that is the most important thing you're going to do. And we talk about all the elements to getting that done, but primarily you need to just start. But it makes me think, Dave, is there still a $5 planet, Lipson? There is. And that's where I always tell people it's for 50 megs. So if you didn't want stats, stats are another two bucks. 50 megs, if you're recording at 64 kilobits per second mono, that's roughly a half a meg a minute, that would be 100 minutes. So if you did four 20 minute shows, you know, you could get by with that. Yeah. So what I'm thinking is to Chris's point, just start, maybe you can start at $5, right? Maybe you can figure out how to get $5. It's almost literally one coffee and Starbucks. Really, if there is the case where someone, like it's a kid who wants to start a podcast and, you know, they don't have the $5, but they just, they want to get something fun out. If you're going to go with something free, make sure it's something that you're not hacking together because hacking things together can really get messy and complicated and break stuff. But yeah, maybe go ahead with one of those free hosting services as long as they do give you that ability to leave them when you're ready to and able to invest at least a few dollars per month. And I'd say make that your next priority of where to invest in your podcast. And that's my two things I was thinking about. One, where could, if free was the only option, you really have to ask yourself, is it really the only option? But if it is for some reason, where could someone go for that? And two, the second thing is that $5 option, like Chris is saying, just start. Cool. Maybe then the $5, $50, maybe you'll be limited in how much you can produce. That's the compromise you're making. That's fine. You're at least still getting the taste. You get to know what it takes to record a podcast. You know how much work is going to go in. And when you decide that you're here, then you can upgrade when you have the ability to, because maybe you want to do more episodes or longer episodes or something. And that process, if you're in a system like lips, is going to be seamless. Nothing is going to change. You're just going to upgrade your package. So there are options, I think, at even the good hosts to just scrape up some pennies to even get started so that it's not in your way of getting started. But you know, let's see, who was it in the chat? It was Jason. Jason Norris. Thanks for joining us, man. He's usually here. He says some use archive.org, and that is free. And I have some pretty strong opinions about that. But what do you guys think about archive.org? For me, it makes me sad. It's just archive.org is meant to archive the internet. It's not a media host. So here, again, we're painting with peanut butter. Can you do it? Sure. Should you? No. So when you're using Dropbox and Google Drive and all these other things, it's like, you know. And I think your point there, I mean, archive.org to me is a special case, because they're really trying to do something for creators. They are trying to capture, you know, keep a record of the internet. And so I have seen some big shows, big shows that are getting crazy numbers on Patreon, by the way. Use archive.org. And it's like, at a minimum, they should be donating to archive.org. I mean, they're pulling ridiculous amounts of bandwidth. What I do like, I don't mind archive.org to take your finished MP3 file and host it there, but not as that your feed is pulling from. I like having it there to preserve your podcast, right? So when you pass on some day, you stop paying for your hosting, that pipe's going to shut off. If it's on archive.org and you always have a link to it, you know, like, then it kind of stays alive as long as archive.org stays alive. And that won't happen if people are abusing the system. So archive.org is free. Daniel, what do you have to do to quote unquote hack archive.org to make it work? Because I know, I feel like there's been issues over the years with that. But do you, I mean, is it just as simple as uploading it there and then pointing your feed to it? Almost, yeah, pointing your download URL over to the download URL from archive.org. They do support byte range requests. The download speed isn't super fast, but it's not super slow. It's far easier and less hacking than trying to use Google Drive or Dropbox, or one of those kinds of things. The thing you do have to watch out for is the stability or the reliability of the hosting. Of time. Yeah, I've seen some people recently say that their podcasts were not available, like the MP3 version couldn't be downloaded, but the M4A version, the archive.org, I guess automatically transcodes, that was available. So that was really weird. Things like that can happen if you're using something that's free. Compromise. Or super low cost. Yeah, you're compromising something somewhere. Yeah. And, yeah, Chris wants to know in the chat if he can mention Spreaker. We're super going to talk about Spreaker. For sure. That's cool. Where are we? We got, we have time. So what do you want to say about Spreaker, Chris? I just, I mean, we mentioned archive.org, but as far as something where you're not painting with peanut butter, Spreaker is a great way to start and not have to pay, but again, get that seamless transition. I mean, there's no free Libsyn plan where you can just kind of test the water, but you could do that with a Spreaker. They should have that, by the way, Dave. I actually think that you should have a, I never use anything I can't test, like just try for free, but it would be great if Libsyn, what if they gave you like 15 megabytes for one month? You know what I mean? And not that you can affect that, but I think that would be great, personally. Right. Put up one episode. Yeah, sure. Something, something. Yeah, Spreaker's free. Right before you buy. Is five hours. They charge based on the hours. And also pipa.io, their free plan that they have now is five, five. Yeah, I think it was five hours as well. No, five episodes. That's where it was that you can have only five episodes in your account. Well, and that used to be SoundCloud was like you could upload a certain amount and then you had to basically, yeah, you had to delete stuff in order to stay current, which is a big problem. Well, yeah, with the SoundCloud free plan. Yeah. That's what I'm saying, the free plan. What really hurts though, I think, is when people are saying, oh, I'm paying for SoundCloud. And then it's like, well, wait a minute, if you're going to pay for a media host, get off SoundCloud, go over to something else that's much better. That's what I'm banging my head against the wall about with some people. I don't understand why they're paying SoundCloud. Because you can get, they can upload a daily show. They can upload a lot more megabytes, right? If you get the, there's an unlimited plan that's only like a hundred bucks a month or a hundred bucks a year or something crazy. You used to have that. Yeah. And that's why a lot of even bigger shows went there, I think. Yeah, I, too, scratch my head because someone would be paying Lips in 15 or $20 a month and they'll run out of room at SoundCloud because they're using a free plan. I'll say, yes, you should probably go over and see how many plays you're getting over there, which is usually next to nothing before you decide to, you know, do the $15 a month plan at SoundCloud. And I'm amazed at how many people are getting literally a handful of downloads and they'll go ahead and upgrade to the paid plan at SoundCloud. I'm like, so they're paying for two media hosts, which to me. Oh yeah, that's weird. Yeah, so. And also the workflow is terrible. Like I wouldn't want to upload if the, I mean, yeah, I don't know. So Spreaker does have a free, free option, Chris? Yeah, they have the, what is it, three or five hours. So you can under one account, you can upload or have multiple podcasts, which I've recommended to teachers and really mostly to teachers as a way to maybe do a classroom podcast or get your students to start their own shows. You have the RSS, you could do the artwork, you can get the multiple RSS feeds, which was actually a solution that I gave to somebody, hopefully I was right, I think I was, because they were looking for a multiple RSS feed option, but weren't into doing self-hosted WordPress and PowerPress and generating multiple feeds that way. So. Amen to that, by the way. That was the best alternative I could come up with. You know, mentioning Spreaker brings up one of my other requirements. And I really don't like throwing Spreaker under the bus for this, but Spreaker fails on two points from my list. Now I know Rob Greenlee over there really knows what he's doing and he is working on trying to get Spreaker to support these two things. And Spreaker has their hands full with the BlogTalk radio merger and everything, but so one of the things Spreaker doesn't do is they don't support all of the new iTunes tags. They support some of them, not all of them. The second thing that's more a recent requirement that I decided I'll require, if you're going to use the RSS feed from a hosting company, is that they allow you to map your own domain to them. So like Emily Prokop, for example, with the story behind podcast, she is able to map her domain to Libsyn. So what that means is, when you enter the story behind podcast.com, it takes you to the story behind podcast.com. It doesn't take you to the story behind podcast.libsyn.com slash whatever. She's using the Libsyn website. Is that what you're saying? Yes. Important point. Yeah, so she's hosting it entirely and powering it entirely with Libsyn. A lot of people might not realize that some host also give you like a web page, right? So that it sort of makes it all one. I think pretty much all hosts give you some kind of web page. Something you can go to on the web. Even if you had SoundCloud, you have a SoundCloud page. But this is kind of different. Well, like with Libsyn, Blueberry, they have kind of web sites. All right. I mean, I guess. Yeah, like Spreaker is closer to SoundCloud in the sense that you get a page on or a profile more like on their bigger site. Whereas Libsyn, you're getting your own website, but then you can own that website with your own domain. Like Blueberry, Libsyn, Podbean, do support that you can have your own domain. So that when that's what people type in, that's what they land on. None of this, your name.podcasthostingname.com. Right. And you like that for branding purposes? For branding, but also just for the universal recognition of it. Yes, you can get myawesomepodcast.com redirected to whatever your media host website is. But then still, when people land there, if you ever switch, if they bookmark your old site, they're bookmarking your.mediahostcompany.com URL. So you're not able to redirect them over to your new site. So it's just so much better, so much easier for maintaining ownership of your platform if you can map your own domain to that webpage. Right. So an important factor there is Daniel pointed a couple things that he'd like to see Spreaker improve on, but it's still a good host, and it really depends on what you need, right? I think Daniel Taven and I are going to have like the highest of standards. Like we want it to meet all these things because we understand all the nuance of podcast hosting. But, you know, that doesn't mean it doesn't work for you. And maybe Spreaker has other things that other systems, you know, they're live streaming abilities. Maybe that is something that you want maybe to get, and I think you can get your own app. I mean, there's certain things. Like it just, you have to go, it should meet basic minimum requirements. Let's cover that a little bit again. What should we, if we're going to pick a podcast host, maybe we're going to move, someone's deciding now they're going to move off SoundCloud. Maybe what are the, what are the minimum things that a podcast media host, now we're talking about someone that's specific to podcast media hosting. What should those have? So we've talked about being able to redirect your feed, I would say easily, right? Being able to go in and do that easily. Dave, you like the ability to basically upload and then unlimited bandwidth in terms of, it doesn't matter how many people listen to your podcast. If you do have that Oprah effect where someone comes overnight, you're not worried about your server crashing, your website host taking you down, or them telling you you got to stop that, right? So what else, anything else? What's a minimal viable requirements for a podcast host? Well, I would say the, like Daniel said, the iTunes tags, I think those should, we're not sure exactly how important those are going to be. It's going to say, why are those important to you guys? Like, I mean, I get it. Well, in addition to just what they support and what they make possible, and I think we're going to see a lot of other podcast apps start to support those tags as well. Possible in the iTunes, in the Apple podcast app specific only, right? Well, not only maybe, the other people probably use it. The thing is with iTunes tags, other apps tend to use it. Right, yeah. They'll propagate eventually into other apps as in like the other app developers will at some point decide, yeah, we're going to start supporting those tags as well. So there is that, but even without that, I kind of look at this as a litmus test because if the company fully supports these new tags, then it shows that they are staying current with what's going on and with podcasting. They want to make sure they are making stuff that's standards compliant, that's supporting all the features, providing the tools for the podcaster. They know what's going on and they're willing to support it as the industry changes. And so the companies that don't do it, like, let's throw SoundCloud under the bus since we always do. SoundCloud doesn't support the new tags. They probably never will. Why? They don't care. And I think it's very reasonable to say they don't care about podcasters or podcasting. And this is one way that's reflected in that. Now, some of these other fringe startup podcast hosting companies and some of the others don't care as much either. Like, there was actually one company that I feel like I have a good friendship with a couple of the people in the company and I was talking to them at an event recently and they said about the new iOS tags or iTunes tags. They said something like, yeah, we were thinking about it and we're going to probably support a couple of them after iOS 11 releases. But we don't think it's all that important to support all of them. What are you saying? You're saying that it's not important to provide these standard new tags to your audience. It's not important to be up with the podcasting industry. That's why I say that this is a witness test. That if they don't support this, then it shows that they're not current or they don't care. Yeah. And I mean, same with SoundCloud. They're not in the community. I don't know who. I don't know anyone who works at SoundCloud. I don't know who I can get in touch with and good luck on customer service. So, again, I want to know and see the people active in the podcast community. They should be at podcast movement and podcast conferences like that, you know what I mean? So, because again, like you're saying, Daniels, they understand the space. They're going to stay up to date with it. I mean, Lips and Blueberry probably, you know, a few others had those tags implemented before they were actually live, essentially. So, being used. I think Podbean was actually the first company to support them. Shannon had said that, Shannon from Podbean had said that they supported the new tags like a couple days after they were announced. Blueberry with PowerPress was super quick. They just wanted to do a little bit more vetting because someone had given them some wrong information about a potential bug. So, they delayed it, but still, they had it released far in advance. So, okay, back in 2013, I'm not sure that Podbean was on our list. There used to be probably one thing that was, I feel like that was holding them off. I don't know. Dave, is Podbean the one that you couldn't figure out who the heck Podbean was? Yeah, when they first came on board, I actually invited them to come on my show. And they were like, no, we're good. And I'm like, what? Because I've got a whole bunch of podcasters looking to me. And it wasn't until I met Shannon years later that it made sense because the original people that started that were based out of China. And English was not their first language. So, that's when I was, because I was trying to figure out where they were. And Mike Phillips helped me figure out that their address was really like a PO box of some, it was just, we could not figure out where they were. And that was just really weird that here's somebody that wants us to trust us to put our media on them and we couldn't figure out where they were. So, once I met Shannon, and they've brought on Vernon Ross as well, they have other people, Jen from DC Podfest. They're getting people, and those people are at events now. So, it's again, they're doing that so we can trust them basically. So, they're in. They make the list. They make your list, Dave? Yeah, it's one of those that their stats are okay. But they're adding more things now with advertising. I just logged into my Podbean account for the first time and I can now sign up to have dynamic ad insertion, which it is what it is. Nobody's going to get rich doing that. But they also have an advertising place. And I talked a little bit with Shannon at DC Podfest and the fact that some of those features you can use, even if you're not using Podbean. So, I need to investigate those a little more because I wasn't, I was kind of aware, but I haven't done any kind of deep dive with Podbean in a while. So, I need to go over and check them out. We should do live dynamic ad insertion on this show where Dave just starts playing the guitar right in the middle of what we're talking and like some jingle just rings out like, use bounty or I don't know what I mean. That's still a brand. But we're just going to do live because we're going to be rich. The one thing I have against Podbean right now, at least, is that their stats aren't IAB compliant. And that's a very new thing. And I can understand companies being a little bit hesitant with that because to be a member of IAB costs a lot of money. But you can still read the guidelines and implement the principles that they're talking about inside of those guidelines from the IAB. But then who's to say that you are actually following them? Like, there are certain. Well, who's to say that anyways? I don't think that there's no they don't do an audit on you once you implement them. You can pay someone to do an audit. No one's paying that because it's an insane price if we listen to Todd Cochran that you're not paying to audit. That's for sure. You may be implemented at that point. It's kind of like I talk about the affiliates trusting the podcaster. You have to trust the company. And that's one reason again about knowing the people and them being the community. It lends that trust. Who do we have? Who else makes the list? In 2017, 2018 for our stringent requirements. Now, Spreaker doesn't quite make Daniel's list. I don't think it's just missing, right? Because you've added that new requirement. That's well and in the IOS tags because they only partially supported. So they're they're off the list now. And I would say for me, it's fine. I mean, if that if that's where you need to go to get started, I do like the free and then you can go up if you decide to stay. I'm OK with it because again, I think it goes to trust. I know Rob. I feel good that he works there. He's been in our community forever. And we've met the founders as well. And there and I think what I've seen from them is a lot of effort to keep improving. So I'm confident in them enough to say if that works for you, go ahead. We got Podbean who I typically haven't recommend just because I haven't tried it. But I'm, you know, if Daniel is quite to trust, if Daniel and Dave say, then I'm good with Podbean. You know, Chris, you had one that I mean, would you recommend that one for the free option? That's I don't know how long you've been using it. But I've been using Pippa over a year again on a secondary show. Sure. A show that clearly is not as important. Well, I'll pimp it. It's called Podcast PD. Nice. Wait, what is that about? It's about using, it started as a Twitter chat real quick to go on the tangent. Podcast PD is a podcast about giving teachers professional development, but through a podcast. Okay, I thought I thought it was, I thought you were fact checking everything that Dave, Daniel and I were saying. You were the 50 and it's like, when they're wrong, I'm just going to correct them on Podcast PD. I'm the cups. No, and we also use a part of that show to talk about podcasts that we listen to and to promote the use of podcasts for learning to teachers to make it a part of how they learn and grow. Cool. So I mean, you're having a good experience there. I mean, understand that if you go there, they may not be around, right? And so, but you said they let you move, right? If you had to. Yeah, you can move if you have to. They've reached out and they've tried to, they've tried real hard to get me to move everything I do over there. I ignore that. Sure. But actually, something I had thought of in you guys talking about who the acceptable companies are. I know from being a sports fan and, you know, a lot of times in sports, we talk about who would you put on the Mount Rushmore of blank? Which of these companies' logos would you guys carve into the Mount Rushmore for media hosts? Yeah. Well, I mean, clearly Lipsid and Blueberry make those, make that, make that. I mean, the two, I don't know how many busts we have up there if it is truly Mount Rushmore. But I think Podbean does deserve to be up there too, because they've been around since almost the beginning. But they're starting to chisel on Podbean. You know, in the chat, and Jason, or someone asked this a long time ago, this is one I wanted to get to. Jason Norris says, how about Fireside FM? That's Dan Benjamin. He does podcast method and, you know, five by five network. I'm actually think that this one, I haven't been able to evaluate it enough, but I think this would make my list and because of trust and because of Dan, and I know he knows what he's doing, I would not hesitate to send someone to Fireside FM. And I think that the, if you have an all-you-can-eat type need, if you are trying to host massive amounts of megabytes, I think when I looked at it, this is the place to go. They give you the most amount for the least money, right? So if you had a network, Fireside might be exactly where I would send you. Well, no, not quite. It's $19 a month for unlimited storage, unlimited downloads, unlimited episodes for one show. Then it's $8 per month for each additional show. Okay, but who's to say, you know, like you're doing on Lipson, you've got multiple shows on one account. Who's to say that I just, yeah, I can upload, you know, unless they're monitoring, right? Yeah, true. But even then, let's pretend you've got one show, you do a three hour a day, seven day a week podcast. That might be, then that probably is going to fit your need because you're not, you're going to pay a lot more, I think. It probably lives in a blueberry for that kind of megabyte. If that's your podcast, I hope you're also applying for radio jobs. Yeah, it happens. It's probably the person who couldn't get the radio job. But, you know, I think that's new. I think when they first opened up, they didn't have, I think they had some limits on there. They're brand new. There were some very restrictive limits, but it's been open for quite a while now. And, you know, I think their whole gig is that they, they give you a webpage as well. It's supposed to be really clean. I don't know how much you can control that. And I don't know if they have data. They design their visual appearance and user experience. I would say they're probably the best because Dan Benjamin is a highly skilled designer and user experience designer. So you want something that looks great and probably is the easiest to use fireside? Yeah, probably is that something that really bothers me about them? Well, Dan Benjamin replied to a tweet asking about whether they would be IAB compliant or if they are. And he said something like, well, if we are IAB compliant, it's basically by accident. That's not too reassuring. And also on their webpage, it says industry trusted analytics. Get access to one of the industry's most established and trusted podcast download tracking systems. What? It's been around for a year and a half. Yeah, most established and trusted industry trusted industry. Maybe he's just filtering you through blueberry stats. And then you can say that. I don't know. You know, I do, I do give a certain amount of trust to Dan because, you know, he might not be, there was reaction to the IAB thing. You know, I think maybe word of that wrong, but I'm thinking he's probably thinking that we're, we're doing, we do what we're doing so well for podcasts, podcast specific media hosting that we probably are compliant. But who's to know? Who's to know, you know, statistics is a whole other conversation and stuff. But if you're talking about just hosting, I would not hesitate to put them there. I think that that's probably a great option. And, you know, there's people who use Squarespace. And I think that they use Squarespace because it's easy and it's clean and looks great. But that we've seen creates a lot of can be problematic. It's not the easiest system to work in, I don't think. And oftentimes I struggle to recommend something that's not Squarespace when someone wants, they don't want to deal with a WordPress site. They don't want to deal with any of that stuff. They just want to host their audio and put it on something good. So fireside again, as Daniel mentioned, it looks great, it's clean, it's easy, might be another option. So that is definitely one I wanted to throw in there. I don't know if anyone else has experience with it, but I would give it a solid look for sure. But, you know, that raises a question for me. When you guys do what you do as influencers and helping people start shows, make better shows, I think, and I see this with teachers, are we dealing with people who they just want to get it done? And, I mean, we, I will say that the four of us and many people like us, we are very into creating the podcast, what goes into the art form and editing the audio and designing the website and putting, you know, again, blood, sweat and tears into our creation. Whereas a lot of people, they just want to sit down, record something and put it out to the world. And for some people, they can't do that fast enough. Sit down, record it, publish it, minimal editing, they're not doing post-processing. So does the literal average person care about any of this? Or do they just want to record and get it out to the world? They don't know to care, right? They might care if they listen to the show, right? But most people, you know, that's why I think our audiences are going to have a ceiling. They're only going to be X amount of podcasters. And minority podcasters are going to go out and search for a show on how to do what the heck it is they're actually doing, that they're that involved. But a lot of podcasters just want to record and get it done, right? That's why I always ask, why are you getting into podcasting? Because, you know, if it's just to have fun and, you know, hang out with my buds, by all means, that that's a whole different answer than somebody's like, well, I want to use it to help market my business. That's going to influence my answer because I might send them over to some free, you know, website thing that they don't care. They just want to get it up. But if it's somebody that's going to be using it to, you know, market their business, I'm not going to send them to a free site that might be out of business in nine months. So for me, at least. I recommend what I believe is a good option. And right now, free options. I just don't feel like they're good options. And that's why I generally recommend things that cost is because I know you can trust them. I know that if you host your podcast on them, you don't have to worry about it going down or they're stealing your audience or submitting your podcast to Apple for you. And you don't get your stats at all from Apple when those stats come out later this year. Yeah. I mean, for $5 a month, that's $0.17 a day. I sound like Sally. Feed your podcast. $0.17 a day. You can feed a podcast. It's true. It's true. No, that's good. You're Sarah McLaughlin. That's right. Exactly. Don't. Don't know when saying that. I'm going to get, we'll get a content strike on YouTube. I always, I always think of songs. And then I think, oh, there's our content strike. Okay. Well, we are going to wrap it up here. If you have questions, hit us up because I'm not sure that we covered everything. Obviously, we can always cover this more. We did this update four years after we did the original one. I'm sure we'll revisit as well. Alex was going to join us. Alex from Feed Press. That's an option. I don't know. I don't think anyone here has tested it. I think a lot of us know it as a kind of like a feed burner alternative. And I, you know, I know Alex is good at what he does. So turn it down. Turn it down. Just turn it down, dude. That's the lesson today. Just turn it down. Just turn it down. So I am talking to my daughter because she's, I put some headphones on her and the audio is too loud. So we are learning about audio in real time here at a young age. But so check out, you can check out Feed Press. He couldn't make it in, but he'll probably join us at some points and see if that works because they do hosting it, which is something I didn't realize for a long time. And that might, that might be another option. So there are lots of options. Again, reach out to any of us. If you are curious about something that we didn't talk about, and we will see you on the next roundtable. But as we head out, Chris, if you have anything else to add, feel free to jump in, but definitely let us know where you can find your podcast. And thanks. I want to say thank you to all of you guys for the opportunity. I'm happy to say I am one tenth of the way to my t-shirt. And again, I'm Chris Nessie, host of the House of EdTech podcast. So if you know a teacher and there's one in your life, please recommend them to go to christenessie.com. And my podcast will help them better integrate technology into their classroom. And I'd love to connect with anybody because I love to talk podcasting. And you got a shout out early in the chat that said you are the man that comes to EdTech. So definitely go over there. So you brought one of your listeners and it's always a good thing to do. No, we know that you know what you're talking about. So definitely check out Chris's podcast. Give me your address. I'm going to start addressing that envelope for the t-shirt and get that right out to you. Shirts in the mail, I got you. Shirts in the mail. Exactly. Daniel, co-host, podcast is roundtable. Thanks so much once again. Thank you. I'm Daniel J. Lewis from theodacitytopodcast.com. Watch for my extremely controversial episode finally coming out about why you should not publish audio on YouTube. Ooh, a free podcast host, but not really at all. Because Bang's in the chats as YouTube as a podcast host for certain values of the term podcast. Yeah, can't really do that. So, but there is people trying to use YouTube to, as a, as a, what would you call it, on a publishing platform, but as another platform to be discovered on, right? But Daniel, go check that out because Daniel, she, that one should be good. Do or don't. Very controversial. Maybe we can bring that up in an upcoming episode. Dave, co-host, thank you so much. Yeah, speaking of controversial this week on the School of Podcasting, I had a guy that said he has his guests. They have to subscribe, rate, and review five stars to be on his show. And so I had him on my show to explain why he thinks that's not slimy. Did you require that he rate, review? I should have, but I did not. I did not. I should, that would have been funny. But that'll be on this week's School of Podcasting. So, I love it. Schoolofpodcasting.com. That's right. Bold move, Dave. I like that. I think he has, just brings them on. He brings those controversial people and just says, what the heck's wrong with you? And so that I'm going to have to listen to for sure. Not that I don't already listen because I do. But all right, podcastersroundtable.com slash guest. If you want to sign up to be on the actual round table, Chris knows you can sign up. We'll get you on here eventually. But Chris, great job. We'll get you back for sure. I know we had some tech issues, so we'll get you back. And I know you can contribute on almost anything we talk about. So that's always nice. But when you submit, you'll be able to let us know what you want to talk about. And I picked topics that way. So podcasherroundtable.com slash guest. We'll see you next time for 104. Wave goodbye. We're out of here. Both hands, both hands, double hand.