Monthly Archive for April, 2005

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Podcast hosting: cheap or free?

Published on April 18, 2005 in bandwidth and podcast. 29 Comments


Podcasting is a fun hobby, but leaves you with several tens to hundreds of megabytes of MP3 files to host. If your podcast turns out to be popular, you might also have over 20GB of file downloads per month (‘bandwidth’). This rules out any free hosting option like Geocities or even your local ISP. What are the other options?

CCPublisher:

free
Creative Commons, together with Archive.org, offer you the option to host your content for free. This is directed towards CC-licensed or open-source audio, so your own speech or your own music. Don’t use it to host illegal/copyright-troubled content.

idisk.mac.com:

$100/year (or $8.5/month)
if you’re already a subscriber to Apple’s .Mac program, this is an easy option. It is not the fastest or most reliable option.

libsyn.com:

starts at $5/month (up to $30)
built for podcasting: based on the #MB you add per month, not on the #GB downloaded per month (so the cost is predictable). Has detailed statistics (although some graphics would be nice). “Liberated Syndication is podcasting made easy”

bluehost.com:

$6.95/month (2-year subscription)
2 GB storage, 75 GB/month bandwidth. Is a general purpose hoster, so if you want to add the actual podcast blog to it, you can (you can add a WordPress blog through the Fantastico interface)

EV1Servers VPS:

$39/month
for the bigger fish: 10GB of storage, 100GB/month bandwidth. If even this is not enough, you can go up to a $99/mon fully dedicated server: 60GB storage, 1000GB bandwidth.

For up-to-date information, keep an eye on the podcasters Yahoo! group.

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Googlistics: messing with the big “G”

Published on April 5, 2005 in Google, spam and Wordpress. Closed


He probably also first thought it was an April’s Fool joke:
Matt Mullenweg from WordPress was discovered to have used his PageRank 8 site (WordPress is a popular open-source blogging software) for hosting lots of irrelevant content, with the purpose to get high scores in Google rankings and (let a customer of his) make money on Google Adsense.

The content in articles is essentially advertising by a third party that we host for a flat fee. I’m not sure if we’re going to continue it much longer, but we’re committed to this month at least, it was basically an experiment. However around the beginning of Feburary donations were going down as expenses were ramping up, so it seemed like a good way to cover everything. The adsense on those pages is not ours and I have no idea what they get on it, we just get a flat fee. The money is used just like donations but more specifically it’s been going to the business/trademark expenses so it’s not entirely out of my pocket anymore.
(from wordpress.org)

Andy Baio (Waxy) broke the news on March 30th, at a moment when Matt was on holiday (and off-line), so he only replied on April 1st, about a thousand angry emails later. His defense is that it was a interesting idea, badly implemented, not followed up and never evaluated. Since Matt does not have the profile of a cash-hungry opportunist, and he’s explaining this to an audience of people that understand these reasons (reads like an IT project management what-not-to-do list), the storm will probably blow over.

Normally this is the kind of situation where one would say: “SEO? Leave that to the professionals!”. But the fact is that here in Belgium, some of the companies that claim to be SEO specialists, use dirty tricks all over. Hidden links, bot cloaking, keyword spamming, <noscript> tricks, the whole shebang. It’s like they read the Google SEO warning page as a guideline. “Hey look! We could put ourselves and other customers on every client’s doorway pages. Neat!”.

Joris just posted another example (Immoweb.be) on his SEO blog. And again the so-called “SEO professional” fooling around is Extenseo, just as it was for Automagazine and Actel. As one can see on their unprotected Javascript hosting site, they recently add VW/MyWay to their customers, so we can expect those homepages to be featured in the Hoe Het Niet Moet (What Not To Do) series soon!

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