The Best Podcast Hosting Services, Veteran Podcast Host Review

Having the best podcast hosting services makes a world of difference.

With great podcast hosting you can get data about your listeners, upload your show quickly, not spend a ton to syndicate your show, and have customer support that helps you overcome any issues.

The Best Podcast Hosting Service Should Have:

Low-cost monthly hosting fees
Great customer service with a great response time
A great user interface that gives you key data
Simple to use interface for uploading your episodes
The ability to future schedule podcast episodes
Access to data like how many listens your show and episodes have
The ability to share your show with other platforms (YouTube, Spotify, Google Play, etc)

After using over ten hosting services and hosting one of the largest podcast groups online – this is what I believe to be the most essential to a great podcast hosting service.

In this article I’ll start by sharing with you my favorite podcast hosting service, then I’ll review some of the other top-rated hosting services and share the pros and cons of each.

The Best Podcast Hosting Service – #1 Podbean

What is the best podcast hosting service?

As a veteran podcast host who podcasts for a living – I have found Podbean to be the best podcast service around. It’s the service I use, the one I recommend, and the host that ultimately settled on after using nearly a dozen other hosts.

Here is why Podbean is number one:

Low-cost for unlimited uploads *this makes a HUGE difference*
Easy to use interface
Easy process to send episodes to other podfeeders and YouTube
Key metrics about your listeners are readily available
Fast response times from customer support
A free customizable player for your website
An easy process to monetize your show with Podbean directly
It’s easy to become an affiliate

When I look at everything most podcasters need and will need, this list from Podbean takes the cake. Of course, there are a few ways that Podbean could improve their service. To make sure you know where the weaknesses of this host lay, let me mention those too.

Where Podbean isn’t the strongest:

Not the most in-depth abilities to look at listener data
Not the fastest customer service (Blubrry is the best in this area, but Podean is second to them)

Those are the cons in my opinion. For me, and for just about every other podcaster – the pros are fantastic and the cons really don’t matter that much.

Even if you desire lots of data about your listeners, Podbean gives you what you need. Of course, hosting services like Blubrry can give you more data (and so can SoundCloud), but as a seasoned veteran podcaster, you don’t need a lot of data to help your show grow.

If you’d like to try Podbean for free, here’s one month to try it out on me.

In the case of customer service, if you want to pay extra to get that initial support, you could always start with Blubrry and then switch over to Podean later to cut costs.

As a serious podcaster, I’ve found Podbean to be the best for new podcasters and for seasoned veterans like myself that have created and monetized several shows.

Even when I first started and wanted lots of data, I quickly realized the key data for tracking my show were; how many listens did I get daily/weekly/monthly, where are my listeners from, and what episodes are getting the most listens.

The Second Best Podcast Hosting Service – Blurry

This next service gets a big nod for their customer service, interface, and ease of use.

When we used Blubrry they were fantastic!

As a new podcaster, I initially felt very confused with setup, integration, and setup of my show on their platform.

With every question I had the team at Blubrry sent me fast email responses which included links to basic articles that covered my questions, or they personally answered my questions.

The pros of Blubrry are:

Easy to use interface
Excellent, top-notch customer service
Robust interface for gathering data on listeners
A nice plugin for WordPress for uploading episodes to WordPress
An affiliate program that you can apply to participate in (create a free account and apply)
Easy to use interface to send your podcast to other pod feeders
A great database of tutorial videos to assure you get set up properly
Hands-on customer support

All those points make Blubrry an excellent hosting service. In all honesty, if their prices were a bit lower – I’d switch over to Blubrry.

With that, let’s go into the cons of Blubrry:

It’s one of the more expensive podcast hosting services
Not everyone who uses their services qualifies for an affiliate spot (this is good to assure quality control, but bad if you’re a customer and you get denied).

That’s it – those are the cons of Blubrry. In my opinion, you can’t go wrong with Blubrry, but if you wish to upload a fair amount of content – you’ll pay more with Blubrry.

The Third Best Podcast Hosting Service

The last on this list of best podcast hosting services is Libsyn.

While it’s likely the most mentioned among podcasters – it’s really not the best. Put simply, this service has gained fame by teaming up with some key podcast influencers and by being one of the earlier hosting providers to flood the market.

All that being said, they are a decent company offering pretty much the same thing as the above companies mentioned – the key distinction being they’re still a bit pricey, their customer service has been one of the slowest supports I’ve seen.

The pros of Libsyn:

Easy to use
Widely popular among many podcasters
Solid interface giving you access to listener data
Great tools to feed your podcast to other pod feeders including YouTube
Ability to monetize your show through Libsyn (once your show reaches a fairly high threshold of downloads per episode)

The Cons of Libsyn:

Slow customer service (and they were actually so rude that we left them and won’t ever go back)
The customer service team doesn’t seem to be very knowledgeable
Poor help getting out of their service or transferring your podcast to another provider

As you can see, Libsyn offers a lot of great stuff. Their interface is easy to use, they’re popular which makes finding helper videos can be easy, and they offer lots of data about listeners.

The main reason this provider isn’t the best is due to their poor customer support, lack of hands-on help (as a podcast production company, we’ve had to contact Libsyn a lot on the behalf of our clients), and their prices aren’t made to match subpar support.

Podcast Hosting Services That Didn’t Make The List

Buzzsprout

Although I have little experience with Buzzsprout, I know enough to say that it’s not one of the best podcast hosting services.

That being said, I felt it important to include it here so you can decide for yourself, and so you can see what the pros and cons are. If you would like to try out Buzzsprout, they do offer a free 90-day plan, but I’d recommend you go with one of the other highly rated hosting services mentioned above.

Pros Of Buzzsprout podcasting hosting:

You pay by the number of hours you upload (but still a bit costly compared to other hosting services)
They give you a nice, “How to make a podcast” guide that delivers a decent amount of information)
Lots of free content with membership to help you launch your show
The interface comes rated as ‘easy to use’

Cons of Buzzsprout podcast hosting are:

It’s sort of expensive ($12 for 3 hours of content each month. For $9 you get unlimited uploads with Podbean).
As for other cons, I don’t know because I have not used this service, and why would I when I can pay less and get all my needs met by one of the top three podcast hosting services.

SoundCloud

For years I used this service in conjunction with several other hosting services. I know, it sounds like overkill to pay to be on multiple podcast hosting platforms – but I did it to test, evaluate, and to see if being on many platforms would help my show grow.

As a popular platform, SoundCloud is one more place to be at – but as a main hosting service it’s terrible.

The pros of SoundCloud for podcast hosting are:

A slick podcast player that you can embed into your website (and even on some social media sites)
A large community of music listeners who may find your podcast
It’s cheap, that’s about it when it comes to pros.

Now let’s go into why it’s a bad choice for a main podcast hosting service:

Little to no customer support (as in they pretty much never reply)
You can’t schedule content out for future dates
The inability to feed the show to other platforms directly within SoundCloud
It’s not really meant for podcasters – SoundCloud was created for music creators, not podcasters
It costs just about as much money as other podcast hosting services but gives you very little

Conclusion To Help You Choose The Best Podcast Hosting

When you finally make your decision, be sure you choose podcast hosting that delivers:

Excellent customer service (initially this matters, but later you’ll barely use it)
The ability to future date and schedule releases
Easy integration with your website (learn about podcast websites here)
Low cost for your uploads
Integrated and easy to use systems that allow YouTube and other podfeed sharing
An offer to help you monetize your show directly through the podcast hosting (when you’re new, this is nice)
Useful resources to help you troubleshoot potential issues

With all of this in mind, we like Podbean the most (here’s our link to get 1 month free, and yes, we get about a tiny payout). Affiliate payout aside, we have found Podbean to be the best at meeting all these needs for any podcaster.

That being said, we strongly believe you should decide for yourself, so try any or all of the podcast hosting services mentioned here and decide for yourself.