Move fromMypodcast.com to self hosting

[hopeunited]

Hi All

We upload our weekly service to a free podcast hosting site:

mypodcast.com

Now with this being free it isn't that great.

I'm beginning to wonder if we should host our podcasts on our main site, where visitors could maybe view all available podcasts via some sort of slider.

Does anyone have any advice on this?

Info greatly appreciated.

Regards

[mattcleaver]

We need more information about your main site before we can tell you about your options.

How is the main site built? Wordpress, Joomla, Expression Engine, using a church website hosting company, other?

[hopeunited]

Hi There

Sorry for the lack of info.

www.hopeunited.org.uk

As you can see its Joomla CMS

Podcast site:

http://hopeunited.mypodcast.com/index.html

Regards

[Mark0514]

I would highly recommend the Joomla component called Preachit. I moved to it from Bible Study (another great component).

[hopeunited]

Originally Posted by Mark0514

I would highly recommend the Joomla component called Preachit. I moved to it from Bible Study (another great component).

Hi There

Could I see it on your site?

The demos on their website arent that great.

Thanks

[BrianAltenhofel]

Something else to consider is the demand for your media. For the most part, I generally recommend against self-hosting media.

[Mark0514]

Originally Posted by hopeunited

Hi There

Could I see it on your site?

The demos on their website arent that great.

Thanks

Sure our media page is here

Note that I have divided our media up by series, followed by date, and there is video and audio of the messages and our worship sets (with the appropriate licensing). Preachit organizes all of that and creates an xml file used for the audio podcast. We use Vimeo to host the videos and host the mp3's on our site.

[sempei13]

I'm hopefully finishing the edits on "Podcasting Church" this month, so this question comes at a great time (after I've finished the writing).

First, is it audio or video or both? If it's just a weekly sermon of say less than an hour (with audio), you can get away with hosting your media on a free Dropbox.com account. They provide a public folder which lets you give out a URL. Since the storage space is limited, you could rotate the podcasts to a storage location (like your website) after the initial bandwidth hit. Do that with redirects. So each week you upload a file to dropbox and put a pointer url in your feed. You also take the oldest media (that's at least a month old from your dropbox account and redirect the url that's in your feed to your site).

Libsyn is who I've been using since 2005 and I find them very reliable, too. They're not free, but bandwidth isn't a concern as you pay for how much you upload, not how many downloads you have.

Paul