Yes, the demise of iWeb is official see here. I have 12 months to make other arrangments.
Several things have cropped up with my proposed move to Squarespace. In fact I was going to link that first sentence to the previous article until I realised I didn't know how to do that yet and had to learn.
Hosting with MobileMe has made podcast publishing a one-button affair. Once the podcast is finished in GarageBand, I just hit "publish" and it sends the episode to my iweb site and updates the RSS automatically. I do nothing more than one click. But once you get away from the Apple ecosystem, there is all the background stuff to do manually. More work. Yurgh. Is this what real bloggers do?
Then there's the hosting. Squarespace has unlimited storage but individual files must be less than 20Mb. They are clearly in the web publishing not content delivery business. Most of my podcast episodes are 70Mb or more. If I do video, the files are much larger again. The Squarespace help pages suggest hosting them on Libsyn or similar. I'm fine to host my video on Youtube or (preferably) Vimeo, but where do I put the audio? This exercise is starting to get expensive.
Libsyn seems out. At $5 for the classic plan, I would get only 50Mb of new podcasts per months, that's less than one. The $15 plan has 250Mb but that seems a bit steep.
Podbean is slightly better at $4.95 for 150Mb per month which is roughly two episodes.
Any way I jump, it is very clear I need Feedburner to hide where the actual podcast files are saved from my audience. This is invaluable if you have to move the files for any reason. Basically, iTunes points to Feedburner and feedburner points to the files. So changing hosts doesn't affect iTunes, it still sees the same thing.
My domain registration at GoDaddy includes hosting, 10Gb and unlimited bandwidth, so I think I'm using that for now. Given the SquareSpace plan was a little more than I anticipated, I think free hosting is in order.