byte-range support servers

While appreciating your desire to keep costs down, I have to say that you may not find free services entirely satisfactory. They have to make a profit somehow, and most of them do it by adding adverts to your website. As they can't do this with a podcast feed or media you may not find them very enthusiastic on the subject.

It's difficult to find out about byte-range requests: you can test for it, but only once you've been able to put media files up there (unless you can find media files belonging to someone else the same server). Whoever you go with you should ask about this before committing - Apple will reject your podcast if the server can't handle this.

To test for this, open Terminal and paste this in

curl -I -r 200-300

followed by a space and the URL of a media file (not the feed). A successful result looks like this:

HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content

Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2012 21:59:27 GMT

Server: Apache

Last-Modified: Thu, 23 Aug 2012 04:06:04 GMT

ETag: "3fb8374-2bf169c-4c7e6fa626300"

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Content-Length: 101

Content-Range: bytes 200-300/46077596

Content-Type: audio/mpeg

These are the key lines:

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Content-Length: 101

You got that? If you did, and iTunes still won't have it, I'm afraid I can't answer that.