Buzzsprout

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Build the podcast hosting I actually need instead of Buzzsprout — and know which half is genuinely awkward.

**Directory submission.** Each one needs an account and an approval, and several are slow. That is administrative rather than technical, it happens once per show, and it is the main thing you are paying somebody to have already done.

The rest — the feed, the file, the counter — is under Castos and Transistor elsewhere in this catalogue and it is a fortnight. The parts that decide whether it works:

**The feed must validate.** Against a real podcast validator, in the test suite, on every build. An enclosure with a wrong byte length breaks downloads in some applications and is the most common error in this category.

**Guids are permanent.** Change one and the episode republishes to everybody who already had it.

**Loudness normalised to around -16 LUFS**, measured and reported. An episode quieter than the last is the complaint listeners actually make.

**Downloads counted to the standard**: one per unique listener per episode per 24 hours, at least a minute delivered, bots excluded, range requests reassembled rather than counted separately. Record raw and derive the figure, so you can explain any number to an advertiser.

**A delivery network in front.** Podcast applications download aggressively and in parallel, and bandwidth is the recurring cost of this whole business. Measure it per episode before deciding anything.

IF YOU ARE STARTING OUT
- The honest answer is that the free tier of a host is fine until the audience exists. The reason to own the feed is that moving later is the risky operation, so owning it from episode one avoids the migration entirely
- If you do own it from the start: your own domain for the feed address, always. That is the one decision that cannot be undone cheaply

WHAT MATTERS MOST
The feed address on your own domain, from the first episode. Everything else can be changed later; that cannot.