A podcast site serves files. A radio site sits in front of something continuous, and the page has to keep up with what is happening right now.
Everything here differs from on-demand audio because nothing has a beginning, an end, or a fixed URL.
Listeners connect to the streaming server directly. The website hands them a link rather than proxying audio, so a thousand listeners cost the origin nothing at all.
Every open player asks what is on every few seconds. That polling outweighs page views by a wide margin and is answered from cache rather than by a database query.
The current-show panel changes at fixed times whether or not anyone visits. It is driven by a scheduler, so the site is not showing the previous programme at ten past.
A presenter mentions a form on air and it receives a few hundred submissions in ninety seconds. That is a write spike triggered by something invisible to your metrics.
Recorded shows and podcasts sit next to the live feed as ordinary large media, served from the edge rather than through PHP.
A station's website is a window onto a broadcast. Its correctness is measured in minutes, and its traffic is mostly players asking for an update.
The busiest endpoint on a radio site is not a page. It is whatever the player asks every few seconds, multiplied by everyone listening.
The defining fact is that the interesting content is happening elsewhere, continuously, and the site reports on it.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Stream delivery | Listeners connected directly to the streaming server | Proxying continuous audio through the application holds a worker per listener for as long as they listen, which no pool survives. |
| Metadata endpoint | Cached with a lifetime measured in seconds | Every open player polls for the current track, so that endpoint receives more requests than the rest of the site combined. |
| Schedule turnover | Driven by a scheduler rather than by page views | The current-show panel must change at the top of the hour whether or not anybody happened to load a page at that moment. |
| On-air submission bursts | Capacity allowed for presenter-triggered spikes | A mention on air produces hundreds of form submissions in under two minutes, from an event that never appears in web analytics beforehand. |
| Catch-up media | Served from the edge as large static files | Recorded programmes are the same delivery problem as any large audio file and should not compete with the live site for workers. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Move the station site across — migration is free, catch-up archive included.