Transcript
This is Behind Hosted - Episode One, the podcast detailing the creation of Hosted.

So what is Hosted? It’s yet another podcast hosting company? Why? Why not?

Essentially, I found that all the other podcast hosting companies didn’t have the things that I wanted them to do, you know, they haven’t got API’s, or they have, but they haven’t got this or I don’t know, they seem to make it too easy for you. But in a way, that’s not great.

I want, I want to see raw downloads like the actual logs, for example, but no one seems to do that. So I figured, make my own little service for my podcasts and see where that goes. And I found hosted that FM was available and I spent $80 on it and sort of made it into a thing that I needed to do.

So what is the actual goal of Hosted? See, the problem I’ve had recently is that I’ve gone away from just.. I just want more privacy in the world you know? You do literally anything these days that’s online and someone’s tracking you for some reason that is creepy as hell, you know, if you haven’t got a Google Analytics, and there’s some other thing or, there’s like Hotjar showing where they.. where the visitor clicked exactly on each page, and you can replay a person’s browsing history, and it’s pretty gross isn’t it really, it’s just horrible. I mean, you don’t need that much information. At most you need. How many people are hitting the site? Do they go anywhere from there, or do they bounce?

So what I want is, if I’ve got a player embedded in my site, my site does not use Google Analytics, for example, uses er simple analytics actually, link in the show notes. But if I’ve got that, and I embed a player that then loads Google Analytics is sort of defeats the point really. Yes, I’m not tracking but now this podcast hosting company is.. could you not? I don’t need to give more information to Google, my visitors don’t need to give more information to Google, just stop tracking everything.

Track the things that you need downloads, listen times if it’s streamed that sort of thing course, obviously, that’s what you need, especially if you’ve got an advertising supported podcast, you need that. But you don’t need every individual click recorded, it is too much.

Anyway. So yeah, essentially, that’s the, the gist of it, there’s going to be tracking in terms of how many downloads there are going to be tracking in terms of how many subscribers there are, within reason, it’s pretty hard to actually calculate that. But just the bare basics, you don’t need to track where a person scrolled to before clicking on Play, things like those. It’s too much.

Of course, if you the user want to do that, embed your scripts all day long. That’s fine. I just don’t want that from the hosting company without my consent. If you get what I mean? I also love the idea of an open startup. I’m not calling hosted a startup, it’s literally just a sort of I dunno, a little side project that might make money one day. But if it does get to the point where it could be considered a startup, depends on the definition, I want it to be open. So open.hosted.fm will show bare basic stats that how many people hit our landing page.

Nothing identifying just how many visitors they’ve been this week, for example, but it’ll also show the financials. So if I’ve spent money on say the domain, renew that every year, that will be on that site. If I spend money on a CDN need to re-up the CDN bandwidth, then that will be on there. Also an aggregate of customers incoming, so I’ve set Stripe up to pay on the first of each month. So that value will be there.

Essentially, I’m going to link this directly to the bank account I’ve set up for Hosted. It’s using Starling, we’ve got a pretty decent API. So it’s just gonna be open.

I’m recording this right now, before I’ve even really done anything with it. It’s open from the start. I’m hoping to never have the old, incredible journey sort of story. But.. join me on my incredible journey before it’s happened.

I once tried to set up a podcast hosting company in the past, it was called PD cast. I’ve still got the domain, it’s PDcast.com. The problem I had there was that I had a bit of an argument with my manager at the time, he did not like me doing side projects, and asked me to shut it down. About two years later, I’d sort of given up on the idea, but it never really left. So I actually started this project again with PD cast, but I didn’t I just lost interest in the domain. Maybe it just had a bit too much negativity attached to it and I’m not sure but I weren’t really feeling that domain.

So I had a search around you know looking for anything host dot com that sort of thing, literally just typed host into, I think it was namecheap’s domain search and added er.. they have a little beast mode and it adds little things on the end now added -ed. Well hosted, that’s never going to be anywhere hosted.fm the go to podcast domain when dot com’s not available, obviously. And so I grabbed it and spent 70, 80 quid on it or whatever it was. And from there, it’s just it’s been on again off again sort of project. I have actually jumped into this one fully now so let’s see where it goes.

When I left that company, I actually left because I broke my hip and turns out, things get a bit dicey when you sue the company you’re working for. They weren’t a fan of that. So I had leverage. So when I left I got decent enough settlement, you know, good times. But I also took the rights, all rights, IP rights, everything to PDcast. So if in 5 year’s time if this ever kicks off, then It’s never going to be a case that some other company decides, oh, we’ve got, we’ve got rights to this.

I think I actually halved the settlement got from them just for that, right? Probably not the greatest business deal I’ve ever made but I really wanted to make sure that I wasn’t unable to do this in future. I’m sure we can always come back to that later, if anyone’s interested in that.

So who am I, I’m PHP developer, mainly working WordPress at the moment in the day job. Nice bit of Laravel in side projects like this, makes everything so easy to just set up and go, you know, it’s been about six years of development, possibly more, probably about 12 plus years of sysadmin and security, that sort of thing. And generally, I just like to make things just because why not something I can do let’s do it. Cool.

I have until recently been a major procrastinator. Like for example, this episode. It’s taken about two weeks for me to start recording. I keep setting things up or doing this and the other - ooh I need to do this first I need to do that first. But the end of the day it’s just a case of hit record. You can edit it later if it’s crap

I’ve actually got a big pile of washing up that needs doing that’s probably why I’m doing this so I don’t have to do that. Anyway yeah, Cohan Robinson I make Hosted. I make over crap as well

Company ethic so we’ve already gone over the open side of things but something I really stand by is rather lose a customer than lie to a customer. I dunno let’s say the worst case scenario happens and five of your episodes from three years ago disappear. Obviously I’ll do my best to get them back out of a backup but if that’s not possible, for some reason, and obviously it shouldn’t ever be impossible but let’s just say if - you’ll be told why. Oh the backup process didn’t work this that and the other how we’re going to fix it in future.. it won’t be blamed on oh s3 three lost the files or I dunno it didn’t transferred to glacier because Amazon messed up or anything like that.

No, you’re just be straight up told what happened? Maybe not who’s responsible by name, but that we are responsible.

I’d rather you, your next email be “Okay, could you help us move off the service? Because it’s bit crap.” I’d rather that then tell you a lie.. eurgh that’s horrible. No.

..and that’s pretty much all I’ve got for this episode because I don’t really know where I’m going from here.

If you got any questions obviously, email them in hello at hosted.fm or chuck them on Twitter with the hashtag askhosted. I’ve set up a little Zapier thing so that I can track those.

Normal episodes probably end with a financial report if not every episode then every month of episodes, but so far, I bought a domain that’s about it. Everything else is sort of running on my own thing. I haven’t transferred it into its own entity yet because it’s way too early. But in future this section of it we’ll do a little rundown. You know, just enough to give the people that want to know that information, the information but it’s right at the end of the episode so if you don’t want it just skip to the end. It’s fine. Yeah, so far domain 60-odd quid, whatever it was and a bit of hosting but that comes out of my pocket anyway, I’m already using it probably like a tenner, $10 even. Yeah, not much there yet.

The final problem I’ve got, I’ve got nowhere to host this yet because Hosted is a podcast hosting company and it don’t quite exist yet. So I’m not really sure where to put this, I’ll probably put it on Transistor or something. Y’know, they’re good guys, but, but they’re focused more on the enterprise sort of thing. And at the pre startup level it doesn’t quite tick all the boxes that I need as a sort of indie host. If you get wh- an indie podcast host it’s it’s not really ticking all the boxes. I’m not intending to pinch all their customers or pinch all their ideas or anything like that.. Obviously there’s going to be a bit of overlap. probably not going to do the old enterprise login and things like that. That’s just not.. that’s not.. not where this is. This is a business to customer rather than business to business. Obviously businesses are welcome and we’re probably will have features that be useful but we’re not aiming for the the enterprise level that’s… leave that to them. They can have those guys. I’ve worked with enough enterprises to know that’s pain in the arse. Good luck, guys.

So yeah, this will always be hosted on building.hosted.fm. And if you do a slash and then the number that’ll be the podcast episode, so this one will be slash one. And I’m basically waffling at this point, so I’m going to sign off building hosted episode one. See you next time.

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