Podcast hosting companies sell a monthly plan for something that is, underneath, quite small. A podcast is a text file that lists your episodes, and the audio files it points to. Put both on any web server and you have a podcast that Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts and every other app can subscribe to.
That doesn’t make a host a bad idea. They earn their fee in other ways, which we’ll come to. But if you already have a website, you may already have everything a podcast needs.
What a podcast really is
A podcast feed is an RSS feed, the same kind a blog has, with one addition: each item has an enclosure, which is the address of an audio file.
<item>
<title>Episode 1: Starting out</title>
<enclosure url="https://example.com/media/episode-1.m4a"
length="28800000" type="audio/x-m4a"/>
<guid>episode-1</guid>
</item>
A podcast app fetches the feed every so often. When a new item appears, it downloads the file the enclosure names. That is all there is. Nobody in the middle is needed for it to work.
What the directories ask for
You don’t have to be in Apple’s directory, since anyone can paste your feed’s address into their app. But most listeners search there, and most other apps use Apple’s catalogue, so in practice you want to be listed.
Apple publishes its requirements. For the show as a whole, the feed needs:
- a title and a description
- cover artwork
- the language
- a category, from Apple’s own list
- whether it is explicit
And for each episode: a title, the enclosure with its address, its size in bytes and its type, and a unique identifier that never changes.
Artwork has to be square, between 1400 and 3000 pixels on a side, a JPEG or a PNG.
The category matters more than it looks. A show without one isn’t listed.
Your server has to behave. Apple says the server holding your files must answer HEAD requests and support byte-range requests, which is how an app plays an episode before it has finished downloading. Ordinary web servers and the big static hosts do both.
Submitting it
Apple Podcasts. In Apple Podcasts Connect, add a new show and choose to add it by RSS feed. You need an Apple Account with two-factor authentication. Apple checks the feed and reviews the show before listing it.
Spotify. In Spotify for Creators, choose to add an existing show from somewhere else and give it the feed. Spotify then emails a code to the address in the feed, to confirm the show is yours. So the feed needs a contact email in it, at least while you do this.
After that you never visit either again. You publish an episode on your own site, the feed changes, and the directories notice.
Where the files live
This is the real question, because audio is big.
A rough guide: speech recorded as mono AAC at 64 kbps comes to about 29 MB an hour. Stereo music at a higher quality is several times that.
Check two things about wherever your site is hosted.
The largest file it will take. Cloudflare Pages, for one, refuses any single file over 25 MiB. That is under an hour of speech at the rate above. GitHub Pages limits a whole published site to 1 GB, which is about thirty-five hours at that rate.
What downloads cost. Every listener downloads the whole file. A hundred listeners to a one-hour episode is roughly 3 GB of transfer. Some hosts don’t meter that. Some do, and a show that takes off can run through a monthly allowance.
Your own server, or storage such as Amazon S3 or Cloudflare R2, takes far larger files, and is the natural home for a show with long episodes.
What you give up without a host
Be honest with yourself about these.
- Listening figures. Podcast hosts count downloads and show you charts. On your own hosting you have your server’s logs and nothing prettier. If you plan to sell advertising, you will want the charts.
- Advertising tools. Inserting adverts into old episodes is a host feature.
- Hand-holding. A host submits your show to the directories and tells you when something is wrong with the feed.
For a show that is part of a personal site, an audio essay now and then, a reading of your own posts, a conversation with a friend, none of those are worth a subscription. For a show you intend to grow into a business, they may be.
Where Selfish fits
Selfish is a native app for iPhone, iPad and Mac that builds a static site from your writing and publishes it to hosting you control. Its podcast feed is free, and it is one switch.
Turn on Publish a podcast feed in a site’s settings, and every post with audio becomes an episode of podcast.xml.
- Each episode’s size and duration are worked out for you, and the post’s words become its notes.
- The cover is your site’s avatar or, if you have none, your show’s name in your theme’s colours.
- You choose the category from Apple’s list, and Selfish reminds you before you publish if it is missing.
- There is an optional contact email, for the directories that ask for one.
- You can record an episode in the app, or bring in a file. Either way it is converted to a format browsers and podcast apps play, with its embedded details removed.
There is no Selfish server in this. The audio sits on your own site, beside your pages, so the limits above are your host’s. It is on the App Store as a one-time purchase, at a £3.99 introductory price, rising to £9.99 in December. Readers, feeds and links has the settings.