I have never been a fan of using free hosting. To me (IMHO) its not professional. I wouldn't buy a car from someone selling it out of a tent. I want someone who has made a commitment and I know is going to be around. The other reason is somewhere you are going to get bombarded with ads. I was on Linked in and someone had posted an interesting headline to a podcast they had recorded.
At the top of his post instead of showing the name of the podcast I saw an ad for podomatic (A service I DO NOT recommend – see this video to understand why). It read “PodOmatic| Best Free Podcasts. That screams professional right?
Then I went over to listen to it. Remember the ads I mentioned? They put on a slide show as you listen to the audio of numerous ads. Best of all one of them is for “The Black Box vibrator.” There was a mention of Turbine engines, so I did a google search on the black box vibrator, and was thrown into a sea of falic symbols. I think the “Cougar Div” was also a pretty big top off that were weren't talking Turbines here.
John MaGuirk is the podcaster who produced this. I'm not sure John is aware that there are dildo commercials in his podcast (he is now), but John is doing a BUSINESS podcast. Surely John should know to put your best foot forward. By using podomatic you:
1. Have their brand put over yours when linking to “your” webpage on their site”
2. Have dildos advertised in your business podcast.
To me, this is not the best foot to put forward.
Podcast Media Hosting Services I Use
I use libsyn.com for this podcast, and I use blubrry.com for others. Both are run by podcasters – for podcasters, and have excellent customer service and stats. You can use this with you own website (which you can own for $8 a month). This means you total expense for putting together a podcast is going to be between $20 and $30 (that the TOTAL including both media hosting and website hosting).
Why Free Services Are Bad For You
Watch this video to explain how using a free service can really end up shooting you in the foot. For the record, I no long recommend using Feeburner unless its absolutely necessary.
Want to start your podcast right the FIRST TIME? Want to get great sounding audio without spending $1000 on a microphone? Sign up for the School of Podcasting Today!.
Great article and lesson Dave…eeks!
For my own podcast I use Libsyn, but I have a friend who just started podcasting for his organisation and is using a paid version of Box.com for hosting. I have read the Terms of Service and can not find anything saying that it can not be used in that way. They in fact state on their site that, “you can easily store media files on Box and link them to your web page using the ‘Direct Linking’ feature”.
https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/200519538-Can-I-use-Box-for-web-site-hosting-
I am wondering if you have heard of people using this as a host as my friend has started to do for his video podcast.
Thanks Dave
This would be somewhat new (I’ve heard of people using dropbox). The question is where do you get stats then? I guess yo ucan go wtith blubrry.com free stats. It just seems like your painting with peanut butter. When you need a streaming media host, use a streaming media host.