Podcast and Video Hosting: Where to Put Large Media Files

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You have started a podcast or begun producing video, and now comes the practical question: where do these files live? An hour-long podcast episode at decent quality is 50–100 MB. Video at 1080p eats 1–2 GB per hour. That is a different category from the images and text of a normal website, and it needs a different approach.

Why large files should not go straight onto web hosting

Technically you can upload an MP3 to your hosting like any other file. But the problem is not storage — it is delivery. If 100 listeners stream an 80 MB episode at the same time, your server is pushing 8 GB of traffic simultaneously, while also serving your website. The result: a slow site for every visitor, and with weaker providers, a suspended account for excessive resource usage. Web hosting is excellent for your site, episode archive and landing pages — leave streaming of large files to services built for it.

Podcasts: hosting platform + your website

The standard setup that works for 90% of podcasters:

• Audio files go to a podcast host: Spotify for Creators (free), Buzzsprout (from $12/month), Transistor, Captivate. They generate the RSS feed that Spotify, Apple Podcasts and the rest pull automatically.
• Your website stays the home base: one page per episode with an embedded player, transcript and show notes. That is where SEO happens — Google indexes the transcript, not the audio.

Transcripts are underrated: an hour-long episode is 7,000–9,000 words of text Google can rank. Podcasters who publish transcripts consistently pick up organic traffic on queries they would never have targeted on purpose.

Video: YouTube or paid platforms

For video the math is even simpler. YouTube is free, comes with a built-in audience and runs the best video CDN in the world — for most businesses that is the correct answer, embedded on your own site. If you need video without YouTube branding and recommendations (courses, client work), look at Vimeo (from €9/month) or Bunny Stream (pay-as-you-go, very affordable). Self-hosting video only makes sense with very specific privacy requirements.

Where the CDN comes in

Whatever you stream, the site around that content has to be fast — episode artwork, images, player pages. That is the CDN's job: it caches static files on servers around the world, so a listener in Frankfurt gets content served from Frankfurt, not from a single distant origin. All of our plans include a free global CDN, which matters especially if your audience is spread across countries.

The practical recommendation

The combination with the best price-to-result ratio: your site on solid WordPress hosting (archive, transcripts, SEO), audio on a podcast platform with an RSS feed, video on YouTube or Bunny Stream. Each part of the system does what it was built for, the site stays fast, and your total monthly cost at the start stays under €15–20.

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