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[Shameless plug inside] a friend of mine and I have built a podcast hosting platform that is trying to fill exactly that void. We built https://www.podigee.com

by iagooar 10y ago

[Shameless plug inside] a friend of mine and I have built a podcast hosting platform that is trying to fill exactly that void. We built https://www.podigee.com/en https://www.podigee.com/en as a podcast hosting platform, batteries included. You just need to upload an audio file, add the relevant metadata, and we will take care of everything else (improving and encoding the audio into different formats, generating a blog with a correct RSS feed, delivering your audio through a nice, embeddable player from our CDN, connecting with social media accounts, etc.). The platform itself is mostly built with Ruby on Rails + AngularJS, the CDN is a highly-optimized nginx with some clever Lua scripts. We provide world-class, personalized support to free and paid accounts. The business model is based on paying for a given amount of minutes of audio per month, no matter how big your back catalog is. We have been doing it mostly in our free time, but have a good bunch of paying (and happy!) customers. We even help you with getting your feed on iTunes without the hustle. Sorry for the (probably annoying) marketing speech, but it's something we've been doing out of passion and mostly in our free time. Happy to answer any of your questions!

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
This all sounded great but I slowly realized that it's closed source and proprietary.
- busterarm 10y ago
  Right. It's still a platform that someone has to live on and may be hard to switch off. My idea is to give the podcaster ownership of everything by allowing them to self-host.
  - iagooar 10y ago
    Well, this is the same discussion as cloud vs on-premises. Sure that you can run your own VPS, install Wordpress, MySQL and all the other jazz, make sure backups are done correctly, maybe even have a load balancer and two servers behind it. You need to keep everything up to date, take care of installing all those weird plugins that might break your site... Then you'll have to convert your audio files into different formats, bake images and chapter marks into them, make sure your RSS feed doesn't grow too big... Did I mention serving audio files to hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time? You can do all that, sure. But it's not something everyone WANTS to do. I am a software engineer and have a blog myself, and I pay a company to host it and maintain it for me, because I don't want to waste my time on keeping it running, although it's the kind of thing I do for a living. I just want to spend my reduced amount time on providing real value. And that's the whole value proposition of SaaS.
    - busterarm 10y ago
      > Then you'll have to convert your audio files into different formats, bake images and chapter marks into them, make sure your RSS feed doesn't grow too big... Did I mention serving audio files to hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time? And an open platform could still be built to do all of that. I'm not saying SaaS has no value, I'm saying that people who don't want to be behind a closed platform have no option. Why be obtuse about it?
      - iagooar 10y ago
        Being obtuse wasn't my intention. It's true that some people want something they can run themselves, no question. I was just explaining the value that we currently try to provide and the reasoning behind it.
ddon 10y ago
Sounds very interesting... But link is broken, gives me "Sorry, the page you are looking for does not exist."

by iagooar 10y ago

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago

This all sounded great but I slowly realized that it's closed source and proprietary.

busterarm 10y ago
Right. It's still a platform that someone has to live on and may be hard to switch off. My idea is to give the podcaster ownership of everything by allowing them to self-host.
- iagooar 10y ago
  Well, this is the same discussion as cloud vs on-premises. Sure that you can run your own VPS, install Wordpress, MySQL and all the other jazz, make sure backups are done correctly, maybe even have a load balancer and two servers behind it. You need to keep everything up to date, take care of installing all those weird plugins that might break your site... Then you'll have to convert your audio files into different formats, bake images and chapter marks into them, make sure your RSS feed doesn't grow too big... Did I mention serving audio files to hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time? You can do all that, sure. But it's not something everyone WANTS to do. I am a software engineer and have a blog myself, and I pay a company to host it and maintain it for me, because I don't want to waste my time on keeping it running, although it's the kind of thing I do for a living. I just want to spend my reduced amount time on providing real value. And that's the whole value proposition of SaaS.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    > Then you'll have to convert your audio files into different formats, bake images and chapter marks into them, make sure your RSS feed doesn't grow too big... Did I mention serving audio files to hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time? And an open platform could still be built to do all of that. I'm not saying SaaS has no value, I'm saying that people who don't want to be behind a closed platform have no option. Why be obtuse about it?
    - iagooar 10y ago
      Being obtuse wasn't my intention. It's true that some people want something they can run themselves, no question. I was just explaining the value that we currently try to provide and the reasoning behind it.

ddon 10y ago

Sounds very interesting... But link is broken, gives me "Sorry, the page you are looking for does not exist."