Hosting your podcast episode files

MP3 files can get big, and a long-running podcast will consist of quite a few of them, so you should probably host your podcast files separately from your website. You can do this by using a host that provides object storage — a kind of online bucket where you can put a number of media files, which the host can serve across the nextwork.

Many hosts offer such a service, including Digital Ocean Spaces, Linode Object Storage, Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and Cloudflare R2.

Your host will assign URLs to each of your podcast episodes: you will tell Podcaster about these URLs by defining podcast.episodeUrlBase as the base URL for all of your podcast episodes, like this: https://example-podcast.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com. You will provide the filename for each individual episode as episode.filename.

To deploy your episodes to your CDN host, you can write a script using rclone, rsync or s3cmd, depending on your setup. rclone is particularly quick and versatile for this purpose.

Here’s the script that I use to deploy the episodes for one of my podcasts to a DigitalOcean Space.

rclone sync episodes/ digitalocean:startlingbarbarabain -P

Tip

The -P flag in that script gets rclone to print out detailed and helpful information about its progress.