Hey it's Suzi here and I want to help you to understand what a hosting platform is and how it works.

So we’ve got our beautifully crafted podcast and now what? we need our audience to listen to it of course. We use a hosting platform to get it to the podcast directories where our audience can stream and download it. 

So here is understanding the hosting platforms in 3 easy steps:

1. Your platform can be free or you can pay a subscription to use the service. They all work in a similar way and that is to host your podcast on the internet. 

2. The hosting platform generates an RSS feed for your podcast. That will then get sent out to the podcast directories, the feed will update the directories whenever you update your show.

3. Paying for a hosting site will give you extras, this could be more analytics and data about your audience, on some you can create your audiograms or edit your podcast directly. 

So to sum up on hosting platforms; they all do a similar job of holding and distributing your podcast. It just depends whether you want to pay for the service or not and how interested you are in the analytics and the extras you can get on some of the platforms.

Resources

https://anchor.fm/

https://www.acast.com/

https://audioboom.com/

https://www.descript.com/blog/article/the-10-best-podcast-hosting-platforms

You can reach us at @story_publishing or @decibelpodcasts on Instagram