When I was speaking at search engine strategies a few days ago, I had this wonderful discussion about podcasting with Randall (Hi Randall; hope all is well; sorry I can't link to you but I lost your business card).  Randall is in the real estate business and they want to do a podcast.  Like a lot of real internet businesses, they own their own hardware and want to do podcasts but are concerned about the bandwidth.  Yeah I could argue about how bandwidth is cheap, etc but the simple fact is that he was right and I was wrong.

Regardless of how bandwidth is priced, the fact is that he feels its expensive so the question became to me:

How do I make him realize that there is cheap bandwidth out there?

And then, in a flash of clarity like a bolt from above, it struck me: The answer is in DNS.  DNS or "domain name system" is what matches up Internet IP addresses to Internet hostnames.  And, like many geeks, I often thing that the answer is in DNS.  And what he really needs is to do this:

  1. Start podcasting
  2. Create podcasts.FOO.com where FOO.com is the company's real DNS name.
  3. Set up an alias for podcast.FOO.com  because people will get the singular versus plural wrong anyway.
  4. Store all of your podcast media files whether video or audio on a cheap server like TextDrive or ServerBeach or whatever.    You don't need expensive bandwidth and 5 9s of reliablity for media files.  As different companies come out and are cheap then rotate your DNS entries onto some new hosting place.

See?  Wasn't that simple?  Seriously tho if you've got a real data center and you want to experiment with something like podcasting, don't store the data files on your SAN or use up bandwidth at in your real NOC.  Just get some cheap hosting and get on it.  DNS can isolate you from all but very temporary breakages.