What is the download proxy and do I need it?

When a subscriber downloads an episode, you find out. Not just that they opened their app — that they actually downloaded that episode, at that time, from that podcast app.

Without the download proxy, Benecaster can tell you when a subscriber last polled their feed. With it enabled, you get per-episode download counts broken out by subscriber and app. That’s the difference between “they subscribed” and “they listened.”

How it works: Each download request passes through your WordPress site for a fraction of a second, gets logged, then immediately redirects to the actual audio file hosted wherever you keep it. Your server never serves the audio itself — just the redirect.

What it costs you: Nothing to configure beyond enabling the toggle in Benecaster settings. The real-world effect is more WordPress requests — every subscriber download is one more hit to your site. On well-provisioned hosting this is negligible. On shared hosting or an underpowered VPS, a burst of simultaneous downloads can exhaust the PHP process pool and slow down your site — including feed requests for other subscribers. If your host limits concurrent PHP workers or you’re on a low-tier shared plan, test under load before enabling the proxy on a large show.

Developers can hook into the benecaster_download_redirected action to run custom logic each time a download is logged — see the hook reference for details.