Two podcasts off Libsyn in an afternoon, not a subscriber dropped
The Libsyn account was on final notice and two live shows were sitting on it: Pat’s Film Club Movie Mix and The Joy of Swimming. The job was to cancel both accounts without breaking a single subscriber feed.
What shipped, in about three and a half hours: a Castopod instance on Oracle Cloud, the audio moved to Cloudflare R2 and served from media.patkelman.co.uk, both RSS feeds live at feeds.patkelman.co.uk with an OP3 prefix on every enclosure for analytics, and both shows re-indexed in Apple Podcasts Connect against the new feed URLs.
The part that mattered was the rescue step. A script pulled every episode off Libsyn and checked byte counts and SHA-256 hashes against the source RSS, so file integrity was verified rather than assumed. Libsyn 308 redirects were set up so subscriber retention is structural, not best-effort.
I moved both shows onto self-hosted infrastructure myself. The old accounts can close without dropping a subscriber, and two recurring hosting fees are gone.