Upgrade Your Podcast’s Online Presence: Switch To The Right Podcast Website Host Now

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found, and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host, Tracy. Today we're going to talk about upgrading your podcast's online presence. And in particular, what that means is the right podcast host. And in some cases, you may need to switch to the right.

No, no, no, no. I want to say that better podcast website host, which is a totally different thing than a podcast host.

I hate it when I do that. Yeah. Because all podcasts are hosted. That's. That's really good thing to make clear up front because I just goofed and podcast website host might mean switching podcast website host. We're not talking about podcast hosting today.

Okay, so let's step back and let's really be clear here. We've done tons of episodes on this. We believe in a website home base. That is where your podcast should be located. If your only location is Spotify, you are doing the world and yourself a huge disservice. So don't be on Spotify and on Apple and say that's your home base. It is not. What happens when the algorithm changes on Instagram and you lose all your followers? Your home base is gone. You do not want to be in a place that you don't own it and you don't control it. That is what we preach about here all the time. Website is the main home base. And here's the difference. We discovered this when we were talking about analytics last week. 80% of our show traffic come from Google and search of some kind. They don't come from the apps. And, and there's not anything wrong with our statistics. It just means that I'm getting, for the binge factor, 80% of my listens. When most of you get about 10% from your search, that means I'm getting 70% more traffic than you are.

And why? Because of the website. Right?

Because of the website. Because of the home base and the home base. This is the biggest, most important thing, why it matters the most. The home base, the website that you choose. And we'll talk about the different kinds in a minute. But the website that you own and have that belongs to you has greater longevity. Blogs have greater longevity than a tweet, a post on Instagram, any kind of social media, YouTube videos that last longer than that Pinterest, it lasts longer than that, which is surprising is like four days. So like the difference to having something you've invested time and energy and having it last, the longest lasting item that you create will be a blog.

It's absolutely true. And Google itself put out and we've, we've have this graphic, we've used it, we've shown it in the past. But Google put out a study that talked about how long all sorts of different pieces of content last, from social posts to podcasts and videos and eventually down to blogs. And it is absolutely true. The blogs pay off and last the longest. And we can include the that image again in the blog post of this episode. It's a good reference image for you to have sort of lay a land there. But what you've got to understand, if you're a podcaster that doesn't have a website, you need to get one. If you listen to this show at all, you that will sound familiar because we've said it before, but today we're going to talk about a particular aspect of this, which is your podcast website hosting platform. Because not all are created equal. We've experienced an awful lot of customers with problems with their podcast hosting platforms recently.

It feels like it's a little epidemic. So I wouldn't say it's pandemic. It's epidemic, meaning that it's happening so commonly right now that we need to start talking about it with you. And that's why we're mentioning this right now. And your website hosts could be a ton of different places. So we have a lot of clients on SiteGround. We have a lot of clients in GoDaddy. We have a lot of clients in WIX and Squarespace because those are technically hosts. In addition to providing the service of it. Some of yours are actually hosted at like coastgator at some of those places like that.

There's WP Engine, look, there's a ton. And in fact you can even if you want to host your own website on a platform like aws, right, or Google Cloud, I mean they're not your traditional web hosting providers for the average individual because it takes a higher level of tech understanding and capability for you to manage your own website there. Most people are on a hosting platform. So maybe it's a good time to talk about the hosting platforms and what it really means. Okay. Because I think some definitions are important here. And I know some of you podcasters out there listening are like, hey, I don't have a website for my podcast, so this isn't important to me. Okay, maybe today it's not. However.

However, you're going to have to pick one at some point.

You're going to. You're going to need to pick one. And it's highly recommended for the reasons Tracy said, you being found by people online through Google searches. Guess what? Websites and web pages come up first. Even blogs, you know, if you have blogs. But at minimum, having a website is very important. And I do not mean let's. Let's make an important point here. I do not mean that Buzzsprout gives you a webpage, or Libsyn gives you a webpage, or podbean gives you a webpage. No, that's their website, not yours. And it's not really a website. I know you can have a vanity URL, but you're sending traffic to their website, to their servers and helping them. You're not really helping yourself by doing that. And that's why I politize. We don't give you that kind of.

A web page because it's a duplicate listing of what is in the app. It is nothing different than what they already get in the podcast app. And so a seasoned podcast listener who clicks on that and ends up on Podbean's website on your listing there is just annoyed.

It's really frustrating. You're like, wait a second, this is supposed to be the episode webpage. And you get there and there's nothing different. And sometimes even less, I've noticed. Well, especially on Spotify for podcasters, you know, if you're in the app, you actually see a description and information about the episode, whatever you publish for that episode. But when you go to Spotify for podcasters, literally all you get is the track player. Why does someone want to leave the app they're listening in, that has more information and go to another place with a track player. I just was listening to it over on the app. It makes no sense.

So it absolutely makes no sense. But I also want to be really clear here, is that if you are, and most of our listeners are, and definitely our clients at Monetize are right, if you are selling anything, if you are selling yourself as a coaching services, a fitness expert, a thought leader, a book, an author of any kind, like, if you're selling anything and you are using one of those listing pages, the first thing I do is go, ooh, you're not real, you're not a real author, you're not a real coach, you're not a real business. If you were a real business, you'd have a real website at the other side of this. And so that is, it legitimizes you. And that's why Tom and I are gigantic proponents of, of making sure that there's a website when you click website link on any of the episodes or on any of the podcast players.

Okay, so now that we've made that important distinction, let's talk about the website hosting platform. I know this gets confusing. Well, in some ways, yes. But when you think about it, yeah, podcasts are hosted on the Internet. Apple doesn't keep your MP3 files in their system. Same with all the other listening apps. Right. And websites have to be hosted on the Internet too. So there is a common reality to that. But the website itself, you might have a website that's custom coded or it's built on some platform. So let's talk about the platforms because that's important. Okay, WordPress, we recommend easily. I believe more than half of the websites on the Internet are built on WordPress.

The last numbers I, when I was giving you that Wheat Engine article earlier today, right, as we were going over this, is that it's at 40%.

40%. So a little less.

It's at 40% less.

But there's some incredibly high number of billions of websites in the world. So when you think about 40% of that on WordPress, that's an awful lot. So WordPress is a platform you create a website within, and that's also referred to as a content management system. A CMS is the acronym that's often used. And there are many others. There are. I mean, we experience everything pretty much here at Potato WordPress, a really obscure one that we've only seen a couple websites on called Simplero. A lot of people now have been moving to go high level, which is one of these platforms that's trying to be everything to all people. But Tracy, they do host websites, but.

So does HubSpot and those kinds of things. And what I want to say to you is that I think you're thinking about this wrong in that if you're thinking I have a website its own thing and I have landing pages, those are something very different where I'm lead pages, landing pages, those belong in your CRMs. Go high level, that's where they belong. They do not belong in your main website. Your website is a content management system. Right. And if it was truly Being treated like a content management system. You'd be getting organic traffic looking for what you have to say, say. And that's where podcasters really want to play. And so I know there are a lot of you out there who are just like, oh, no, but all I care about is my sales pages. But they're not getting any rankings, they're not getting any traffic, they're not driving anything. So that means you have to do all the work your content does. No work for you.

Okay, so I think the go high level people would argue with you, Tracy, that they're not a real content management system. But I agree with you. They're not in alignment with Google the way other platforms, especially WordPress are. Another one that is very relevant to that, like you mentioned mentioning leadpages, is ClickFunnels, and that is definitely meant for sales pages. But ClickFunnels has made their platform and they will tell you, oh, you can build a whole website on ClickFunnels, you don't need to go anywhere else and look how easy it is to build it. That is true, you can build a website on it, but I strongly recommend you don't. I've experienced it firsthand even more recently with what they call ClickFunnels 2.0, which is their latest version that is trying to be all things to all people. A lot of these different platforms are trying to be like, oh, well, we can, we do that too. We do that too. You can do that here. You can do that here. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. And there's a big distinction. And because.

So wait, I just want to be really clear to everyone listening out there, Tom and I don't have any web hosting. We're not selling any web hosting. We don't have any dog in this game or a dog in this fight, whatever you want to call it. We don't have anything having to do with this. What we see too often is the failure. And we have to help clients pick up the pieces of the failure of the wrong choices here. And that's why we're giving you advice today. It is because we are seeing a huge pattern of failure again and again from these systems. And it's not that their system can't build a website and the website fails. I mean, some of that happens, but that's not the point that we're making. It fails to serve your business. So you're just delaying the inevitable that you're going to have to make a switch and you're causing yourself opportunity loss along the way of not getting the traffic and the business and the legitimacy, the authority that you deserve is not coming your way from using these types of platforms. That's it. That's all that. We really are doing it from this perspective. So I want to clear that up.

Yeah, it's important. And this is a really complex issue and I can imagine people listening to this episode are already like, oh my gosh, I'm going. Getting overwhelmed. And I, I understand that. I want to. Well, and I'm sure we're going to.

Get nasty emails from a bunch of web developers, right?

No, we, we are. Or people. Look, I've, I've experienced it. Let me, I'll give you one little example and then I'll get off of the clickfunnels or call it other web platform thing. We have a customer that was on WordPress for a long time and got convinced by some ClickFunnels developers that instead of just having the sales pages in ClickFunnels and then they'll integrate it into a WordPress website, that instead she should just have her entire website built on clickfunnels. And of course she had to pay them an awful lot of money to do it. And they're saying, oh, we can do it all for you. And again, just because you can doesn't mean you should. Because guess what? When I met with these people and I, you know, quizzed out of them, tell me the good reasons why you're wanting to move this whole website over to ClickFunnels. And you know, I kept asking them questions, well, so where in ClickFunnels can you configure each page for SEO? And what about the blogs? And show me where the this is. And this is because I know what questions to ask to see if this platform is going to be in alignment with Google so that you get found organically in searches. And finally they, they kept saying, well, it doesn't have that and it doesn't have that. And eventually they said, but that's okay. The click funnels method. The whole point about ClickFunnels is you're gonna build your website in it, but then you're gonna pay for marketing to get traffic to the website. And with ClickFunnels, he actually said this to me and I really had to hold back from la laughing on the. It was actually a zoom call. They said, well, in clickfunnels you put money into marketing. And then through The ClickFunnels process, $1 you spend on marketing turns into $2 when you sell what you're selling. And so that's their whole philosophy. So they basically don't care. And he actually said we don't care about SEO because $1 turns into 2. But that also means you have to pay in. First of all, I don't believe the $1 turns into two thing at all, except for maybe the smallest fraction of 1% of ClickFunnels sites. But forgive that for a moment and accept $1 turns into 2. That still means you got to spend a lot of money on marketing. And to turn those large volumes of dollars into two, if you want to make $5,000 a month through your website, you got to spend. I mean, you want to make $10,000 a month on your website, you got to spend $5,000 in marketing. And how many people, especially small business owners, solopreneurs, entre do that? Not too many. And there's the whole.

Not too many podcasters.

Well, podcasters. But this whole issue of doing that successfully without wasting a whole lot of money figuring out how to market to the right people that are going to turn $1 into 2 anyway. Total disaster, in my opinion. So.

And not that we're saying. We're not saying that you shouldn't have landing pages that turn $1 into $2. We're saying that shouldn't be your entire business website. That's what we're saying.

Yeah. There's. If you are a content creator, which anybody listening to this podcast should be or is going to be, if you're researching and going to start a podcast, you're creating content. We're all about turning that content into every different possible. What's the word I'm looking for? Every different possible format that will serve people for free and get you a return of listeners, followers, viewers, traffic organically from the content you create, then organically means for free. You're not paying Google pay per click. You're not paying anything to go and get that traffic. So.

And I want to clarify that with our. Also our goal with that is that it continues to work for you years and years after you.

Absolutely.

I don't want it to just work for one day, one hour, one TikTok.

Right.

Like, if it didn't go viral, then it doesn't work and you put all that effort into it. We want that effort to keep paying dividends year over year over year.

Or work only as long as you're paying for the marketing. Right. I mean, that's the other thing, too. It should work again organically, and you're not having to pay for it. So you're still getting benefit out of. We're getting benefit. And so our podcast customers that have been doing this for six, seven plus years, still gaining benefit and traffic from episodes they published back six, seven years ago. We are too, every day. So, all right, let's niche down a little more and get off of the CMS as the different platforms. Now we do obviously recommend WordPress, but this is not a.

We don't even have an affiliate.

Right. We're not. This isn't an episode about WordPress per se, but with a lot of websites, whether it's custom coded or built on certain platforms, you may have a particular company that you pay either a monthly or an annual fee to to host your website. Those could be what we said before, GoDaddy, WP Engine, SiteGround, and you know, many platforms like this. Yeah, Hostgator, things like that. And for instance, GoDaddy does many, many more things as a company. They're not just a hosting platform. You could buy your domain name through them if you want. They have all sorts of other services. So you may buy your domain names through GoDaddy and manage them there, but your website, it could be hosted there or it could be hosted on another platform. These things are completely different. And we see it getting very competitive in a lot of these hosting companies offering more and more add on services, trying to make more money from each customer and a lot of times trying to sell them things that they either don't need or that other hosting companies have for free that you don't have to pay for. And that's really the essence of what we wanted to talk about in today's session in this episode is you may very well want to do your homework. Consider where you're hosting. Do you have the right fit of services that you need? Are you overpaying or not? And you may want to consider switching for a number of different reasons. That's to get down to really the main point today.

And I want to say to you, if you do not know who your host is, who your hosting company that you're paying is, and you paid a web developer, and your hosting fee is included in their fees, you're in trouble and you don't know it yet because.

You don't have control.

You do not have control of your website, you do not have the ability to transfer that site to another host to lower your costs, to make sure that you retain all your content. And we have seen that happen again and again. We have seen web developers refuse to release sites to people who didn't want to keep paying the high rates that they were charging to renew and they said, oh, as long as you're paying us, then you get it. Otherwise you don't because your hosting is dependent on it. And so they can delete your hosting and all of a sudden your website is gone.

So it's very important that you understand what the structure of your website is. What platform is the website built on? Where is it hosted? Sometimes that could be the answer to the both those questions could be the same company. Often they're not. And what about support and service? Are you paying a web developer who's providing you service and that's a value add thing you're paying them for? That could be. Are you paying the hosting platform for service and support? That could be. And unfortunately it's not the same with every platform. Okay, but I'll tell you, web hosting is getting pretty competitive. It's really kind of like when, you know, the economy's really good and credit card companies are competing for your business and they're offering you a new card and an introductory for six months or a year, you switch to them and you have no interest. There's a lot of that sort of stuff going on where it's a very low price or extra value you get when you switch from one to another. And here's what I want you to understand is that your website is portable unless it's again on one of these all in one platforms where it's all in HubSpot or it's all in clickfunnels, or it's all in high level. Now in those situations, they may not be as portable, but when you have a WordPress website or a custom coded website, or there are a bunch of platforms that could be on any server really is what it is. A hosting platform is, you know, a facility with a lot of servers that your website is on and served to the Internet. Your website's portable and it can be moved from one site to another without losing anything, any value, any keyword rankings, any traffic. All those things should be the same and should be all of your URLs for every page should be the same. And you know, your traffic shouldn't change as long as you don't change the URL, the domain name and all the pages within the website are have the same URLs also. And that's a pretty easy thing to maintain if you know what you're doing or you have somebody supporting you, knows what they're doing to move from one to another. So I Just want to make that clear. Moving one website host to another does not necessarily mean you lose anything. Hopefully you gain something if you're going to move. So give you a couple of examples. GoDaddy is I think a really good platform. On the one hand they've got 24. 7 support. You can call them on the phone if you need help. They can help fix things for you. Sometimes for free. Sometimes depending on what it is, they may need to charge you if you're asking them to make a change to the website or do something that requires a higher level of skill. You can obviously buy your domain name there, build a website there and that's fine, nothing wrong with that. But they also have become a very big company over the years and they're trying to become an even bigger company and they're offering all kinds of add on services and charge you pretty high rates for either building websites, modifying websites, even charge you for secure certificates and things like that that other platforms don't. Now I like GoDaddy. There's nothing wrong with them but I like them for certain things. I don't want to have everything in GoDaddy managing my domain name. Yeah, very important. If you're going to do email through them through Microsoft Office 365 that's a pretty good thing to do through them if you want to do it that way. But again that's a choice. You could do email through GoDaddy or other places. Yeah.

There are also a lot of free services. I mean you don't get Microsoft360 buy but you can get email services that come with your host.

That's right.

Right. So.

So another platform like SiteGround, which to be transparent is where we host our websites because they have really good support. They don't charge you anything for secure certificates. The support is very helpful. Well they'll help troubleshoot and do things for you. They don't charge extra for that. There's a lot of great things about. And they have email and they're very inexpensive. That's right, the email. You can have emails for your domain, as many as you want for free and you know you don't have to pay any additional money. Not that's not going to come with the Microsoft Office or anything like that. And if you don't need that, great. I mean so many people have an.

Add on for that.

I think they do. But so many people are using like Gmail for their email even for their own domain name through Gmail and there's you know, freeways that's Done or inexpensive ways anyway. So the point is, make sure you understand what you get and what you don't get with your hosting platform and shop around on the pricing. Don't overpay. I find people paying so much money either monthly or in an annual and they're tied in for an annual then and you know, can't. If they leave, they don't get prorated back all the time. So make sure you know what you're doing. But it is really important. Oh, speed and optimization. Let's talk about that too. Because there's another aspect of your website being hosted at one of these website hosting platforms. There's a lot of times your website is on a server with a whole lot of other websites. You don't have a website that's big enough to justify having your own server. And you may not want to pay for having a dedicated server because that's more expensive than being on a shared server. So a lot of times you're on a shared server with other websites and that can be good, it can be economical and can be not a problem at all. Or it can be problematic. Depending as your website grows, you have a membership site, you get a lot more members, a lot more traffic. Then you may not want your website to be slowed down by the traffic going to these other websites that share the same server. So that's another level of service, having a dedicated server when you're big enough. Most of you probably don't have to worry about that right now. But these are some of the things to understand and I find it interesting. Some platforms find ways to charge money for things they shouldn't. Like with all of the. How many images you have on your website. And you know, it's funny to see the things that certain platforms will meter in order to try to make money. And I hate it when they do that. I think, you know, hey, you have certain amount of space that you're using and maybe that's how it's allocated. But to charge you for how many images are on your website, boy, for a lot of websites they're full of images, especially if they're selling products. And that would get pretty expensive, you know, so you got to ask the right questions and dig into it and understand what you're doing. And many of you may not want to do this. Like, oh my gosh, this is beyond me. I really, I don't have time for this in my life. Okay, I can understand that. So just understand you might be paying more than you need to because you don't Want to dig into it and really get into what am I paying for, why am I paying for it? Is everything configured in. But my number one priority is everything configured and in alignment with Google. That's the most important thing because that's where the organic traffic comes from. Then it gets to other things like, you know, performance, efficiency, cost, ease of use, support. Support's a big one. That's pretty high on my list because no matter how long.

And then I would say that the big one after that is security and verifications. Because if you don't have SSLs and you don't have verifications and you don't have all of the things you need to comply and you're doing an email campaign, let's say, say your website and domain verification matters. So those things matter in the long run. So those are some other things that we would consider depending on your type of business and what you're doing and running there.

And you know, one other quick detail in the spirit of making sure you're aware of your entire web infrastructure. Just experienced this yesterday, honestly, and have a customer that we've created their website and connecting it to the domain name and they said, oh, Here, here's the GoDaddy information. They give us access to GoDaddy because that's where the domains controlled. We're going to connect the domain, go to GoDaddy and guess what? They bought their domain name at GoDaddy but somewhere back in time, years ago, they actually gave control of that domain name to yet some other yet to be determined platform. GoDaddy's even having trouble figuring out what it is. There are technical aspects about that where, you know, you can't control your own, configure your own domain name even on the platform you bought it from. And that's called, you know, DNS and pointing name servers somewhere else. That's as technical as I'm going to get. But at least you, you hear that term and know what it is. So GoDaddy is actually because the customer has no recollection of ever giving that control to anybody else. They said, all right, GoDaddy can rip it back from them and take full control. But if anything like an email was configured on another platform, it's going to stop working. Customer understands that, is willing to deal with the fallout of that. So we're having to go through the painful process of ripping it back before we can connect it with the website. Very unfortunate. But anyway, you can see there's a lot of complex issues here to deal with. I know this is overwhelming a lot of you already, and I apologize for that.

Tom and I wish we were not experts in this, like we wish we didn't have as much knowledge as we do in this area. It is painful because what we see and what we've had to learn is where all the failure points are, and they're everywhere. There are landmines everywhere in this particular area of things. So the three things that we want to leave you with, that we really want to make sure is know what, where your site is created and. And built. Right. And so we do recommend WordPress. There we're just going to be really straightforward because I'm just so tired of seeing all the others fail and having to go through that eventual change. So WordPress is where we prefer, but you may have yours built somewhere. Know where that is, know who's in control of that, and make sure it's not your web developer, that it's you. That's the first thing. The second thing is make sure you know where it's hosted, where it's being served from, where the server is. And then the third one is your domain or your DNS or whatever you want to call the domain part of it, the vanity URL that you have. Right. Make sure that you're in control of that, no matter which company that might be. It might be a third company. You might have three places that you're using to make that whole package come together to build, to serve your website.

Yeah, you may, okay, may. Bought that domain on Namecheap. You may have a WordPress website and then you have a hostgator for your host. I mean, that happens all the time.

Right? But just make sure you know where all those three parts are. And then the fourth one is your email because it may not be served at any of those places. But if it's using your URL, it's not a gmail.com, right? Or yahoo.com or whatever people are using nowadays. Could be something new. But whatever that is, if you're using it with your website, like ours is potatoes dot com. Right. You need to know where those emails are associated, where they're being served, and where they're being created as well. So that would be the fourth, but that's only if you're utilizing that model.

And yeah, the email can be simpler than that. All these things can be consolidated into one company, but very often we find they're not. And usually it's because, like Tracy said before, some web developer convinced you the path of least resistance was to let them handle it and they just did it the way they wanted to and that they may not have disclosed all that to you. That's where things sort of the mystery comes that has to be investigated to figure out where all the bodies are buried with your online infrastructure and how to make things work or make a change.

That's right. And then the other thing is, is that, watch your charges. This is the part that I like. Some of you are being charged monthly and you don't even know what they are. Or you get this annual charge and you're like, why was that $450? Like, what is. What was just in that? And you don't even know. And some of those things you got complimentary. And then all of a sudden the charges kick in on them. So you have to be very, very careful with these services. And then there's price increases happening all the time over there. This is where Tom and I were talking about it. You know when you have a storage unit and you get your storage unit and you have your three months free in your storage unit as you move in, and you put all your stuff in there, and then it goes to a monthly charge, and then one year later, they start jacking it up. And every year after that, they jack it up and they jack it up and they jack it up. And you go to find out if you had just considered moving storage units, which sounds like a pain, and it is. But if you had just considered moving storage units, you could have saved and spent a third of the cost.

Yeah, you reset the cost moving from one to another. And there's a lot of competition out there on those things, at least here on the west coast coast where we are. So. Okay.

But I do want to say moving your website should not be as painful as moving a storage unit.

It really shouldn't be. It should be seamless, and the public should never notice if it's done right. It's just they're going to the website and they're still getting to the website, and all the traffic from Google is still getting to the pages of your website. That's how it should be. It should never go down. There's no reason for it to. You can export it, get it on a new platform, have it up and running and tested before a switch is made. And then again, it's seamless. So anyway, if it needs to be done right, but you need to be aware of it because it is critical, it is important. And I think in this episode, Tracy, I've probably served, just scare off every podcaster that doesn't have their own website from actually going and creating one and getting one, which is rather unfortunate. This is meant to be, yes, a little bit of a cautionary tale. But, you know, here's the other reality again. Our community here at Potitize, we're here to serve you podcasters. We're here to help you achieve your goals. Any potitized customer, even at the lowest level of hosting, can be a part of these coaching calls and be online with us and ask questions and get support that doesn't cost them anything more. And we, even as a company, do provide support for your website if you want that and need that, because we try to simplify it and make it easier. And I'm not really. This is not meant to be a big sales pitch for that. It's really not. We're here to support you. We want you to achieve your goals with your podcast on your website. And what we're saying is your website's critical part of it.

So, yeah.

Yeah, before we go, like, there's a couple of things that I think are worth paying for over on the hosting side of things.

Okay.

I think speed is worth it nowadays. I think we're too impatient and especially if you're serving a lot of multimedia on a website, a lot of images, a lot of video, I think speed is really important. I think backup service is highly underrated, super critical backup.

Every website should be being backed up.

You shouldn't have to pay for it.

Separate every single day. Every single day the website should be backed up and it just replaces, you know, you can keep backups for a week or a month and you know, they can be stored on servers that way, but then they overwrite and that's all you need because a lot of websites will get hacked, they will have problems. And boy, isn't it just easy to go to the day before the problem and restore that backup and then find the vulnerability and, you know, close it down. But backup is huge.

Is there anything else that you think is really worth paying for over on the hosting side to make sure that.

You have that back kind of management, depending on your. Well, regardless of your needs, I think it's really critical that your hosting platform provides support that's a part of what you're paying for. It doesn't have to cost a fortune. I mean, I think the typical website on sitegrounds like less than $100 a year for hosting and they have support 247 now. It's not always phone during the day. It's phone support available and in the evenings it may be live chat. And certainly, you know, they have a support portal where you can put in a ticket and you'll get answers very quickly. GoDaddy also provides 24. 7. I think they provide 24. 7 phone support. I believe they do, but they're a little more expensive. Actually, maybe a lot more expensive. But support should come with it. But just understand what it's costing you. That's a critical thing. And secure certificates, really, I mentioned it before. That bugs me when you end up paying for that. It should be free because guess what, it's common. Every single website needs to be an HTTPs, which means, you know, if you've ever gone to a link on Chrome and it says this is unsafe, that most often happens because the website or the link you went to was not a secure link. And they're either you just didn't have the right link or the site actually doesn't have a secure certificate. And that'll prevent people from going to see your content. So you absolutely must have a secure certificate on your website. It used to be an option, it's no longer an option. Doesn't have to cost you anything if you're on the right.

I'm a big fan of, you know, to add the fifth thing there. I'm a big fan of having the email where I'm hosted. I just happen to think that it makes it so much simpler in terms of like, oh, I need to add an email. I need to do this. So unless you're using like a Google workspace or you have a big enterprise solution, I'm a big fan of keeping it right there so that you can go in really quickly and add a press@mypodcast.com and marketingypodcast.com and you can go and add an alias at any time to create something new for yourself and just do that easily. I think that that's really a benefit.

I'm in agreement with you. I think for most people and for us for a decade, we did our emails that way. We've only recently changed because the organization is a certain size that we need to do it a different way now. But for most, I agree that flexibility to be able to create those additional emails at no additional cost is a real nice thing.

Yeah. And then when you update your DNS or make any changes over there, it all happens at once and you don't have breaking in your email and that's really important. So anyway, those are the things that to consider. Those are some of the things we're thinking.

So I apologize if we've overwhelmed you today, not the intentions, but these are important things to deal with. You can deal with it, you can get support. It doesn't. You don't have to be a technical person. You just need to be a. A good consumer and make sure you're aware of what you're paying for, where everything is, how to access it, make sure you have control. And that doesn't mean you can't have a lot of other people in it and supporting you, but make sure ultimately you have control because it's yours. And I'll tell you what, such huge pain in the neck when you don't have control and then not on friendly terms with whoever helped you. It gets ugly.

Does get ugly. Yeah. Well, thanks everyone for listening today. We really appreciate you. We're here at feed you'd brand making sure that your entire ecosystem all around podcasting is working to build your audience, your authority and making sure that you can achieve the goals of your podcast and your original reason for starting again. We support Podcasters United. It is a nonprofit. We are@podcasters united.org that's where all the blogs and all of the things we mentioned here, all the links to all of them. That graphic that Tom talked about at the beginning about content relevancy, all of that will be there in the blog post for this episode. So make sure and go and check that out. And if you are not subscribed, we have an AI newsletter over there, Podcasters United. So if you're a poditized client, you already get our newsletter. Don't worry about it. But if you are, want to get some more details, more information, more articles about podcasting, go there and check out our AI newsletter. It's pretty cool.

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