UPDATE: Podcast Garden’s business model is now clear. Without any prior notification (that I saw), they’ve decided that there’s a 30 day trial. Big mistake Podcast Garden. You’re no longer recommended only because you didn’t tell me it was a trial until after I’d used it over a month.
Let me start by saying that I wouldn’t use the RSS feed from any of these hosts. Your feed is your connection to your audience. Use these hosts as a place to store and serve media files and nothing more (except maybe stats).
You don’t want to get in a billing dispute, have the company go out of business, get bought and closed, or something else only to find that you can’t redirect your feed, so you lose all your audience. Control your feed and control your podcast.
In addition to the ones listed in the table below, I’ve also tried PodcastPeople.com, but excluded them because I couldn’t find a way to get a direct, non-https link so that I wasn’t dependent on their feed.
People are always asking how free services stack up to the paid ones, so I thought I’d compare some.
For your information, right now Tech, No Babel is on Libsyn, Tech Help for Churches is on Buzzsprout, and Eternity Changers audio is on Podomatic. Lately, I’ve been playing with Podcast Garden, but after the pay services, it’s quickly become my favorite.
I still think that Libsyn and Blubrry are the best choices because they have a proven track record and have a way to keep the doors open. I don’t see that for Podcast Garden. It could be that this is part of a freemium service, but I don’t know what it is. I’ve sent them a message to ask why.
So, what would the perfect podcasting media host be? It would be free, with a business model that would ensure it wouldn’t close down. It wouldn’t rename your file, would have unlimited storage and bandwidth. It would never rename, delete, or reencode your file. As you can see, none of these services is perfect, so you have to choose.
I guess you could combine, mixing and matching to get a better solution, but in my book, $5 a month to Libsyn is a small price to pay to avoid changing links, or dealing with old episodes disappearing. I acknowledge that when you’re young, or just starting out, you might not be able to find even that kind of money because there are other things you can do with it. In that case, look at the others, but realize their limitations.
Paul
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