After recording my first episode of Setting the Stage I needed a place to host the RSS feed so that people could download the episodes.
My first thought was hosting on the blog right here. WordPress has options for that and they’re pretty cheap, coming along with other upgrades to the website (fewer ads slapped between paragraphs in blog posts).
But… I’m a cheapskate and wanted to start the podcast off with zero upfront investment. That meant delving into free hosting solutions. Lots of hosting services have free or trial plans. The trial plans have the obvious issue of having to pay for them eventually. The free plans have other restrictions, like how many episodes you can upload or how long each episode can be.
After reading the terms for about ten different websites I settled on ACast. Their free plan has no meaningful restrictions. The only negatives I could identify were no mobile support for managing the podcast and the paid plans are a bit more expensive than other hosting services.
So with a hosting site locked down the next step was distribution. ACast hosts the podcast, but your podcast app isn’t searching every hosting site for podcasts, it searches distribution lists like Apple Podcasts or Amazon Music.
Getting onto those lists is actually quite easy once I had an account with ACast. Four of them (Samsung, Podchaser, JioSaavn, and Deezer) are automatically submitted. Two others (Spotify and Amazon Music) I submitted with a button click on ACast’s website. The final four (Apple Podcasts, iHeart Radio, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher) I had to create accounts on those websites to submit them, but ACast had links that took me to the right place without having to search.
Getting accepted into the distribution lists happened within a few hours, but the final step of getting indexed in the search function of different apps took about half a week.
So now Setting the Stage is searchable on all podcast apps and I can just tell people to search for it instead of giving them a huge link: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/setting-the-stage-campaigns-for-dd-and-other-rpgs
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