Built by long-time podcaster and developer Dan Benjamin, using the years of experience he gained running 5by5.tv (both content and infrastructure), Fireside is a solid service for those who take their podcast seriously.

Along with audio hosting, analytics and a website for your podcast, Fireside also provides rich show notes, allowing for the addition of host and guest bios, and a blog. If your podcast has multiple hosts who aren’t on every episode, you can specify the hosts that appear on a per-episode basis, and visitors to your website can see who hosted which ones.

For Benjamin, podcasting means going live-to-tape, and having show notes with lots of links, so Fireside has tools that make it easy to gather links to the topics you discuss, while you record.

If you’re relatively new to podcasting, or you just like badges, there’s a lightly gamified element to the Fireside content management system, that lets you earn achievements for reaching important milestones.

Podcast.co is a hosting service based in Manchester, UK. Founded in 2017, the company has grown to offer hosting, production, studio rental, advertising, education and more. It also runs the MatchMaker.fm service.

The service is aimed at “businesses and content creators” rather than hobbyists or dyed-in-the-wool podcasters, so it handles podcast distribution itself, abstracting the user from the RSS feed. However this doesn’t affect your ability to migrate away from the platform if you want to go elsewhere.

Although you don’t hear a lot from them in the usual podcasting circles, Podcast.co is spoken highly of and reviewed well amongst those who use it.