So, I’m part of an org that operates two podcasts. One is hosted on Podbean, the other Libsyn. They’ve both just put their prices up (with no extra features or increase in space or bandwidth) by almost 50% so we’re looking to move.

I want to give Castopod a go and have a VPS that could easily manage it, with plenty of space and bandwidth but finding unbiased opinions on its features/quality is difficult. So, if anyone has any experiences of self hosting it, how good/stable/reliable it is or things to look out for or features it lacks I’d love to hear about them.

  • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Don’t really know what to say other than it works great.

    Be prepared to become a sysadmin and/or lose your podcast temporarily when something goes wrong and you have to figure out how to fix it.

    Bandwidth will depend on how big your podcast is and how much you want to spend. Serving audio files is pretty easy as long as you don’t have a million people trying to DL a new 5GB episode simultaneously.

    • Leraje@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Yeah, things going wrong is a concern. From the very brief look I’ve had at the repo, it looks like PHP and a standard MySQL/Maria DB runs Castopod so I’m hoping that side of things would be minimal and similar to self-hosting a WP instance.

      The VPS side, I’m reasonably OK with. I’ve been running static sites for a few years with zero issues so far but I am less familiar with this side of things.

      In terms of bandwidth, based on (basic) stats up until now I would guestimate we have about 100 downloads per month and each episode is approx 90-100mb in size so the package I have my eye on, which offers 24TB bandwidth per month should easily cope with that.

      Thanks for the info, much appreciated.

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Serving audio files is pretty easy as long as you don’t have a million people trying to DL a new 5GB episode simultaneously.

      I wonder if that could be rate limited with some mechanism when OP blows up?

      I haven’t streamed audio to a server in a decades since I ran an internet radio station pre-napster. We were using ShoutCast servers paid for by IM Radio Networks (now defunct) then. All we had to do was pay for ASCAP/SEASAC,BMI, SOCAN etc license coverage. It wasn’t a podcast tho, but rather 24/7 broadcast. With few thousand people tuning in every day, we ate up some serious bandwidth I can tell you.

      /end reminiscing