In the early days of online radio, webcasters paid huge amounts of money to secure servers and bandwidth to offer up watery-sounding streamed versions of their over-the-air programming. Today, podcasters benefit from the major advances in technology, storage, and bandwidth that have slashed costs and opened up opportunities to reach millions of listeners.

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Starting in the Garage. If you’re still developing your podcast, you can start by using any of the free podcast distribution resources available to you. If you intend to make your podcast available under a Creative Commons license, you can post it for free at OurMedia.org. The co-creator of Blogger.com has tackled free podcast hosting with his new project, Odeo. And if you subscribe to ISP services like MSN, AOL, or Apple’s “.Mac” platform, you can get “good as free” hosting and bandwidth through your user account. Most early podcasts launched on Apple’s servers, and reports indicate that subscribers may enjoy a boost in capacity over the next year.

Moving On Up. Depending on how your audience uses your podcast, you might have to prepare yourself for a shift to paid podcast hosting. If your podcast is featured on a spotlight show like Adam Curry’s “Podfinder,” your free hosts might not have the capacity to keep up with demand. Fortunately, some innovative companies can take up the slack for you without busting your budget.

LibSyn offers a clever podcast hosting package based on the idea that many podcasters experience a spike of listenership in the week after a new episode is posted. Therefore, they offer podcast hosting at a flat rate based on the amount of audio you add to their servers every month, with no additional charges for hosting or bandwidth. Streamload takes a similar approach, offering storage for free, and inexpensive bandwidth on servers that can scale to handle the sudden surge accompanied by getting featured on Digg or Slashdot.

The Big Leagues. As your podcast grows, you may start to attract paid advertising, Madison Avenue types need to know that your podcast will make it to listeners on time. They also need to know exactly who listened to their commercials. Audiobook vendor Audible has released the first audited podcast hosting solution. For a small setup fee and a few pennies per download, Audible’s servers handle all the heavy lifting. They’ll even dynamically insert ads that have been targeted to each listener.