Moving hosts without losing listeners

Nathan Wrigley Good afternoon, Dan. How are you doing? Good afternoon, Nathan. I'm very good, thank you.

Dan Maby Good to see you. Yeah. I say that like I haven't seen you for a while.

Nathan Wrigley Yeah, you've seen me only minutes ago and then pretty much all week before that. This is the second edition of what we're hoping to become a live show every week. It's going to be at the same time, hopefully, barring some errors in our calendars and things like that. And the idea is to throw around podcasty topics, basically. And so we're going to cherry pick those one at a time. Today, the plan is to talk about hosting and why or why not you might wish to move from your current host and what are the problems and gotchas and things like that associated with that.

Nathan Wrigley Is there anything you want to say before we begin that process, Dan?

Dan Maby I don't think so. No, I think, as you mentioned, we're here to look at the potential pitfalls of moving or migrating hosts and the issues that can come with potentially losing your followers across your podcast.

Nathan Wrigley Yeah.

Dan Maby Yeah. Shall we jump into it?

Nathan Wrigley Yeah, indeed. So Dan and I are both very familiar with building websites. And so for us, the term host is fairly straightforward, but it occurs to me that it is possible in the podcasting space to have a collision of two words because you have a host like we're doing now, people who are hosting a particular show. But that's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about a host, usually a company, which is where you purchase hosting. Basically, you're buying storage and a bunch more.

Nathan Wrigley Do you just want to tell us what is typically involved in, you know, what's behind a podcast host? What do they typically do?

Dan Maby I think you've just perfectly summarized it there. In the very, very highest level, you're talking about storage. You're talking about somewhere that you can get your audio files into ideally a system that has a CDN, a content distribution network that allows that content to be freely distributed at a global scale. You want it to be distributed very fast. The big players such as Apple and Spotify, etc. do require extremely fast.

Dan Maby When we're looking at the RSS feed, and we can jump into that in a bit in a moment, but Nathan, you're absolutely right there. There is this language of host, isn't there, that can be very easily lost. In our world, we're talking about web hosts. We kind of get that, don't we? But of course, for those that aren't familiar with the stack, we are essentially talking about a solution that enables you to get your recorded audio from your local laptop, computer, phone, into an environment that can be shared globally.

Nathan Wrigley Yeah, and I suppose that is a confusing thing for many people who begin a podcast is that they might really not give too much thought to what's going on. Let's take the example of a mobile phone where you've got a podcast app on your mobile phone. You sort of open the podcast app, search for the podcast that you want, sort of subscribe to them or follow them. And then kind of magically in the background, the audio just materializes. And if you're of my age, you'll remember the radio stations where the radio messages flew over the ether. You know, they literally...

Nathan Wrigley It flew through the air and you may think to yourself well I'm not entirely sure where that audio is coming from. Well typically it will be coming from a platform that you've recorded locally. You've made your podcast episode on your on your devices on your hard drive on your computer. You'll then very often with a web interface you'll log into your hosting platform and then you will send the audio up to them and take you know a few minutes depending on your internet speed.

Nathan Wrigley They'll keep a copy of it. You will then bind that to the episode title and the name and the number of the episode and all of that. And then your podcast host will be able to wrap that in what's called an RSS feed which sort of adds layers of information so it tells your podcast player more stuff. Do you want to take it from there?

Dan Maby Yeah, sure. I think that's where this sort of magic happens, isn't it? RSS is a fantastic technology. It's a machine readable. A piece of code. Essentially, it's a URL, a fixed URL that renders XML file formats. That's a standard that allows podcast players to consume. Well, not just podcast players, in fact, RSS is used for various...

Dan Maby Yeah, readers and things like that. Yeah. Posts, news, news articles. There's various ways that RSS gets used across the internet. But it really is a backbone for podcasting. And that's a good thing because it is an open solution and it allows you to distribute your content. And essentially, a podcast player can ping that RSS feed or poll that RSS feed to get your content.

Dan Maby So when you go into a host and you publish an episode, that is essentially the mechanism for your podcast player. So whether you're in Apple or whether you're in Pocket Cast or all the various players that are out there, it's that mechanism. So that... Piece of information that allows the player to get your audio.

Nathan Wrigley When I started podcasting Probably about a decade ago there were there were a few to choose from but there's certainly a lot more now But the thing that I've noticed doing the thousand odd episodes that I've now done is that you do kind of get wedded To your current host and the reason for that is I suppose it's a little bit like when you

Nathan Wrigley Subscribe or start using the services of a bank when you're younger, you know, the first bank that you choose is very often The bank that you'll stay with throughout your entire life and the reason for that is is many You know, you you have so many things tied up with the bank if you change bank You'll have to go to a thousand different places to tell them. Okay. The mortgage is now coming from this other place My wage needs to go into this place And so there's this sort of inertia and I get the feeling that that happens a lot with podcasting You know people are they've used the service for a while.

Nathan Wrigley It's not necessarily breaking So why would I change it? And so I guess we're going to address the question. Why might you wish to change?

Nathan Wrigley What are some of the reasons that you may wish to move from one host to another?

Dan Maby Yeah, I think your bank analogy is actually really good, because I'm very guilty of that myself. I've started with a bank account, I've continued to do so. Part of my concern with the move is the confusion, the problems that come with changing our debits, etc. And that's pretty much the crux of this issue with moving podcast hosts. It's the, your subscribers are essentially tied to your RSS feed, the endpoint of your RSS feed.

Dan Maby And that can go wrong. Sometimes it will go wrong in that process of migrating from one host to another. And that's where you can end up losing subscribers. So the whole point of this is creating a flow that is, that allows you to securely migrate that content across. Now to answer your question as to why you might migrate, various reasons. You may be looking for additional features from your podcast host. You may be looking for lower cost. We can all be a bit price sensitive these days. And cost is very much a factor that we tend to look at when we're looking at these solutions.

Dan Maby We may also be looking for a host that can provide a more technical solution as well, depending on what we're doing. So there's all sorts of different reasons as to why you might move your podcast hosting environment.

Nathan Wrigley Yeah, so you don't necessarily need to be dissatisfied. They might be offering something that's, you know, reliable and is never broken for you. But the landscape in podcasting is definitely changing. You know, there's additional things coming along. We've got podcasting 2.0 tags. We've got, I don't know, maybe you're just looking for a price sensitive move. You're feeling like your platform hasn't really changed, but the prices remained the same or gone up or additional features or what have you.

Nathan Wrigley And so, yeah, and what you said is absolutely true. It can go wrong. But the point is, if done correctly, it shouldn't go wrong. If you've got 10,000 people who you know are reliably following your podcast, in theory, if you do everything correctly, those 10,000 people should never, ever know when they open up their app. From one day to the next, you've moved hosts. They should feel nothing.

Nathan Wrigley Yeah, that's right. Really easy for me to say. They shouldn't be able to detect any difference whatsoever.

Dan Maby Absolutely. And it comes back to what you were saying earlier. It feels a little bit like magic. You're a podcast player and there's your episodes. They're all nicely downloaded. But the mechanism underneath it, most people don't care what on earth is going on there. They just want their episode to arrive and arrive in the right place at the right time.