Hosted is a podcast hosting provider. You upload your podcast and Hosted hosts it for you. Sorted.

Goals

Unofficially my goal for Hosted is to build a podcast hosting platform that Apple wishes they owned. It needs to be sleek, it needs to be cool, it needs to Just Work™. It needs to push the boundaries of what is possible as a podcast hosting platform.

Of course I want the standard stuff, an easy to use podcast hosting platform. I also want to push the boundaries a little though - All features will be available on all plans. Yes, even that enterprise one you wish was available elsewhere.

If nothing else I want to make other podcast hosting providers reevaluate their pricing. I get that $20/mo isn’t massive, but it’s a bit much when you look at the raw cost of storage and bandwidth these days.

Other than that my only goal is to pay the bills. Enough to keep the lights on, enough to keep my lights on, enough to pump back into the company for growth. Sorted.

Features

Of course during the build phase this may change. Ideally we’ll end up with:

  • Private podcast feeds
    • Third party login for your audience.
      • Twitch subs? They can access their private feed just by logging in.
      • YouTube members? Or even subscribers, whatever works for you. Yup.
      • Patreon? You’re getting the idea.
      • OnlyFans? I don’t even know if they have oAuth, but I’ll look into it if there’s demand for it.
      • Etc. I’m open to suggestions! GitHub sponsors, probably! Specific Discord roles? Whatever you come up with - I’ll look into it!
    • We won’t demand any sort of cut, you’re already paying us for your hosting account. We’re good.
    • Multi-audio upload.
      • Rather than create two separate podcasts, two episodes per episode, etc - upload multiple audio files and tell us which one is for your public feed and which is for your private users, and we’ll sort it out.
  • Dynamic audio injection
    • Inject audio clips into your podcast episodes dynamically. Ads, intros and outros, whatever you need it for, go for it.
      • Rules based on things like geolocation, how many episodes a person has downloaded, others rules to be thought up later.

Status

In progress. I’m still building the dang thing. I’ve been overthinking this one for a long while if I’m honest, it’s time to get an MVP out the door.

Marketing

Twitch stream, YouTube videos. SEO as standard, I’ll likely have to write some interesting content for search engines (and GPTs) to inhale. I’d be missing a trick if I don’t do a behind the scenes building-of podcast.

I want to get back into making media, documenting the process of building Hosted is a great way to do that. It will keep me accountable and I’ll also get back into creating videos. I’ve been missing that.

Pricing

I want to have 2 tiers and maybe a free plan. The paid tiers will be simple: Personal or Pro.

The plans will essentially be the same - all of the podcasting features will be available to both plans - The difference will be in things like uptime guarantees, SLAs, custom integrations, NET30 payments, more downloads per month.

Currently I’ve got the pricing pencilled in at $12/mo for the personal plan and $99/mo for Pro. I realise there’s a bit of a steep jump there, but I’m aiming for there to be very minimal reasons for anyone to have to move from Personal to Pro if they don’t want to. Plenty of storage, plenty of bandwidth on both plans.

If you ever need to upgrade to the Pro plan, you’d likely be bringing in at least 10x the cost per episode. Pro is proper Pro Pro, not just a slightly more expensive Personal.

As for free, I’m pondering the idea of opening access to the staging site. The storage and networking wont be as robust (though I wont nerf things on purpose) but it’ll be decent enough for folks who can’t afford to use the main system or want to give the tyres a proper kicking before committing. Only reason there’s not a real free plan is that I don’t want to go bankrupt. I can’t afford to host things for free yet.

Tech

Laravel PHP for the backend. Your standard HTML/CSS/JS gubbins for the frontend. We’ll use one of the new hotnesses later I’m sure, I just need to get the first version done.

Database is MySQL. Probably use Redis for queues so that I can use Laravel Horizon to manage them.

Hosting wise I’ll consider fly.io and planetscale, but I’m not sold on that just yet. I might just chuck it all on a standard VPS to start with and see how we go from there.

I’m torn between Cloudflare R2 and Bunny.net for storing media. The reason being is that I want to be able to use the request logs (both for analytics and to let podcasters access this info directly). The problem is that Cloudflare gates anything access-log-wise behind their Enterprise plan. I’d need to write a worker or something to ping the data across. Raw log access is a standard feature at bunny.net, but bunny.net would likely be more expensive as R2 has no egress fees. TBC.

History

Back in 2014 I had an idea to let podcasters inject audio clips into podcast episodes dynamically when a user started downloading the podcast. I think I was tinkering with SoX at the time to handle this, I’d probably just use ffmpeg for this now. Turns out if I’d ran with that I’d have been one of the early players. It’s a standard feature everywhere now, lol. Goes to show that ideas without execution ain’t worth the paper they’re written on.

I’d love to have a better excuse as to why I’ve not got it done yet, but honestly it’s mostly a mental state thing. I’ve since been diagnosed with ADHD and have had a whole bunch of cognitive behavioural therapy to get systems and processes in place to get stuff done.

Originally this project was named Pdcast(.com) - “Podcasting without the ‘oh’”, or something like that.

I had started building it while working a previous job, it turned out they had full ownership of any IP I created while employed with them during work hours or not. They used this to punish me when I was having issues with management, demanding all work be stopped and the site taken down.. No grudges coming with me, but I’ll never sign a contract like that again lmao.

Luckily I broke my hip at work and while they were not on the hook for the break itself, they did mess up handling it in a way that was close enough to discrimination that I had enough leverage to leave the job with all IP rights over my podcasting and other media plans.

Lucky break.

Follow along!

I’ll be posting interesting updates to the posts section as I go and of course I’ll have to get a podcast sorted too.. I’ll link that here when I’ve got enough of a platform skeleton to host it.

I’ll also be streaming the build on Twitch, which you can find at twitch.tv/cohan, with an edited down more interesting version on the Youtube at youtube.com/CohanRobinson

There’ll probably be some tweets knocking about now and then too, twitter.com/cohanrobinson.

I’ll have to set up an email list too if anyone still uses those..