How much does it cost to host a podcast on Amazon AWS?
Is hosting a podcast on Amazon AWS a good idea? Who better to ask than someone who does it… us.
I go into a lot of detail in this article about how Podnews hosts its own podcast. But if you’re just here for the costs and none of the tech stuff…
Here are details, updated in March 2025.
RSS feed
Looking at Feb 27, our RSS feed was requested 23,450 times that day - using a total of 16.2GB of data.
In total, for January 2025, our RSS feed was requested 784,478 times. The total data transferred for our RSS feed was 114.8 GB.
With Amazon CloudFront, before any free tier, we’re paying $10.54 just to serve our RSS feed.
Audio files
In January 2025, we served 495.6 GB of data for our podcasts - audio files, and (for some clients) episode images.
Audio files (and episode images) were served a total of 639,694 times.
With Amazon CloudFront, before any free tier, we’re paying $42.77 a month just to serve our audio.
Total cost
So, just for the Podnews Daily (an unusually short podcast, it should be said), we’re paying at least $53.31 to serve this show. (There are some extra costs for the S3 bucket it comes from, but they’re relatively small).
But! There is a free tier for Amazon CloudFront, for both bandwidth served and requests. All this cost (both requests and bandwidth) falls comfortably within the free tier. Yay!
So theoretically, this is $0 hosting! Entirely free! Brilliant.
Yay!
Mmm. Yes, but no.
First, our podcast is five minutes long (or shorter). It’s unusually short, and unusually small.
If your show is an hour long, that’s 12 times bigger as a file, so you can multiply up if you like - making a one hour show that’s as popular as ours cost $513.24 to serve. Even if you use up the free tier, that’s still $416 a month.
And then… because Amazon AWS is not a podcast host, you also need to build your RSS feed manually; you need to work out your own podcast stats (here’s how we do ours); you need to work out how to cope with uploads; and you need to host your podcast artwork somewhere.
So, if you’re the type of person who is asking “should I host my podcast on Amazon AWS?” then, I’d suggest, your answer is simple: no. No, you really shouldn’t.
However
Actually, there is a cheaper way. A much cheaper way. AWS Lightsail runs on Amazon infrastructure, and offers a weedy little virtual host, offering 2TB of data transfer for just $5 per month.
There’s a Lightsail instance for $40/month which gives you 5TB of data. You could use this to host the audio.
But, you’d also need to worry about backups and other things yourself, since you’re running a full server. You couldn’t put it through a Cloudfront CDN either; and the initial set of downloads when you release a new show is quite heavy on a little server. We see hundreds of downloads within the first few minutes of every new podcast being available. It’s an effective way to kill your server.
And, to reiterate, because AWS Lightsail is not a podcast host, you also need to build your RSS feed manually; you need to work out your podcast stats; you need to work out how to cope with uploads; and you need to host your podcast artwork somewhere.
So, again, I’d suggest that even if you could keep the costs down, the additional hassle in keeping the servers going probably isn’t worth it. There’s a reason why podcast hosts exist, after all.
