Podcast hosting is quite different from usual web hosting. Although they use exactly the same technologies, podcast hosting is more resource intensive on the bandwidth/throughput part instead of processing intensive. On the other hand, scripts and web applications require more processing power than bandwidth.

A web page may average between 5KB to 100KB, but to produce the page requires a handful of queries to the database and a lot of computation. Even on a dial-up connection, a 10KB page will load very briefly though.

Transferring huge files needs lower computation time, but unless the connection is fast the bottleneck would be on the network part.

Using a standard web hosting for podcast hosting is alright, but should be a problem on a crowded shared hosting, especially if the podcast files are huge and/or there are many podcast subscribers that download at the same time. A server could only do so much at a time…

To accommodate this situation, hosting companies have created specialized hosting server. If you use a professional all-in-one podcast service, chances are they have already been aware of this and adjust their rates based on bandwidth or required space.

Blindly pay for a standard hosting and later use it to host a lot of huge files almost always is a recipe for problems.

You may think this problem is not common. Think again. Nowadays, as the hosting industry becomes stiffer, there are hosting companies who offer 3 Terabytes of monthly bandwidth and hundreds of Gigabytes worth of disk space at less than $10. Very little or none of these services will allow you to use all the resources to their limits.

Often, they will delete accounts without warning even only after using half of the limit in the running month. They are acting friendly if they email you to upgrade to higher priced package.

That’s right. The feature lists are just gimmicks. They look good and sell. There are indeed ways to limit your bandwidth usage by placing a ceiling on the processing power usage, for example. There are tricks that you should be aware of before signing up with a hosting company.

Many hosting services also put a limitation about which files they allow you to host. If you use the server only to host files without directly linking to them from your site, they will disable your account. So, reading the terms of service is also a good idea before you purchase.

Unfortunately, there is no way you can guarantee this problem will never happen to you, especially if you use a shared server.

My only advice is to do your due diligence. Better still, you can go for podcast hosting that is created just to transfer huge files. They are more expensive, but you cannot rely your business on bad services, can you?

Also, read my blog post about choosing a podcast publishing platform to find out which method is the most appropriate for your case.

Related: Podcast Tutorial.

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