In podcasting, when you want to move a show from being hosted on one platform to another, it's important to make the experience as smooth as possible for your listeners and followers across all platforms. This can be done by adding a redirect in the system, that sends listeners automatically to the new show.
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​In most cases, a redirect is a essential step when moving to a new host.

To send listeners to your new show RSS feed, something called a 301 redirect is used. The 301 code stands for the type of redirect - that once a system has detected the change and has accessed the new feed, it should never go back to the old feed.

For this reason, we also refer to a 301 redirect as a permanent redirect. Other types of redirects are temporary, but we don't want to use this type - podcast apps don't work well with temporary redirects, and you will need to keep your old feed up and running, rather than being able to shut it down after moving to Acast.

Imagine you have just moved house. You know that some of your post will still go to your old address, so you set up a forwarding service to tell all the companies sending you post to start sending it to your new house from now on.

It's very similar to a show redirect. Once a redirect has been added to your old show feed, every time a listener, follower or podcast app tries to access the show, the systems automatically responds:

This all happens automatically and instantaneously in the background. Your listeners and followers should not be able to tell that anything has changed from within their preferred podcast listening app.

Once you have imported your show to Acast, you will need to get the redirect up and running on your old hosting platform. You can find guides in this section of our help center, but here are some of the most commonly used guides: