Switching podcast hosting from Libsyn

Hey guys.

Okay, so I'm a current DH customer. I only host my website with you, which right now isn't using a whole lot of bandwidth.

I am hosting my podcast (the "meat" of my virtual product) on Libsyn. I did this so that my podcast listeners could choose an RSS feed that had the podcast and the website updates or just the podcast.

However, I'm really having problems with Libsyn lately. Their system is easy to use, but their iTunes content tagging system is totally jacked. Because of it, I'm not able to correctly tag my podcasts for the appropriate content and I think it's keeping me out of the top 50 shows on iTunes.

Anyway, because I have a veritable bucketload of unused bandwidth here, I'm thinking of switching the hosting of my podcast to you.

Here's my questions...

- How easy is it to switch hosting of podcasts from Libsyn to you? -
- How do you guys deal with iTunes tags? Do you have a no-brainer system? Or do I need to do this myself (meaning, I have to self-teach again)?
- Do you host a lot of podcasts on DreamHost? What's the number one complaint for those who do host with you (please, be dreadfully honest)?

You've already got me as a customer, so you don't need to sell me on this. Up to this point, I love you guys (and your support staff) soooo much better than Libsyn's. You guys are actually responsive and helpful! I just don't want to go through switching over only to find that you're just not that well suited to hosting podcasts... because that would TOTALLY make me switch away from you.

And I really don't want to have to be ticked off at yet ANOTHER company.

Here in the forum it is mostly just user to user, so for TOTALLY solid answers on some of that you're probably going to want to ask support directly through the panel.

I am not a podcaster... yet, but I have thought it out some. As near as I can tell, unlike Libsyn, who is 100% a podcast host, with lots of podcasting needs preset up for you and somewhat automated (the iTunes integration, for instance... despite it not working), at Dreamhost, from what I can tell you'd pretty much be on your own with the iTunes stuff, BUT iTunes would have a way for you to handle publishing to them manually... you would want to go to iTunes and see what kind of code they offer for manual integration into things (for instance, there may be some sort of WordPress or Drupal podcasting pluggin that auto updates iTunes for you if you have your iTunes code to input or whatever).

I would imagine that as long as the server is able to handle your traffic, CPU wise, you'd have about all the bandwidth and storage you'd need for quite some while!

I think you should find out every functionality that your going to want to be enabled to enjoy, be it the iTunes publishing, RSS publishing, Perhaps even newsletter publishing to go along with your regular podcast listeners (which Dreamhost has a setup for), see what will need to be handled manually, and see what Dreamhost can handle "automatically", then decide if that's doable for your needs.

Oh, and that's another thing... I think Libsyn pretty much has their own built in CMS don't they? It's also going to matter what you're going to do about that... you'll want to investigate which CMS is going to be the most "podcast friendly" too... some may have better fitting pluggin / module support for your needs. I do recall specifically seeing a podcast module for Drupal, but if you did this kind of thing then you would definitely NOT want to use the "Easy One Click Installs", as you'd not have access to modulize as you wish.