The internet has created a whole new way for musicians to promote their work. And while social media is a big part of an artist’s marketing, having your own website is also a huge part of successful promotion. For musicians, there are quite a few options for creating and Hosting a website. So, let’s take a look at how you can build a great website and find the right Web Hosting. We’ll also cover our recommendations for musician website hosting.
Building a Musician’s Website
- Multimedia Friendly
- Touring and Event Calendaring
- Email Marketing
- Online Sales
Certainly a musician’s website needs to incorporate multimedia features, so you want to be able to include audio and video clips as well as high res photography. You also want to have easy editing capability for including things like a touring and event calendar. If you plan to sell merchandise on your website, you’ll need to make sure you have eCommerce features to include an online store. You’ll also want to include email marketing so your fans can sign up for a newsletter or other announcements.
Web Hosting Considerations
- Be Prepared for Increased Traffic
- Need Upgradable Hosting
One of the most important considerations for a musician’s website is to be able to handle sudden increased web traffic demands. If you and your music suddenly become wildly popular, you don’t want your site to be crashing because it can’t handle spikes in traffic requests. So, whether you go with a web host or website builder, you want to make sure you have upgradable resource options.
Like for other artists, a musician’s website is one of the categories where it can make more sense to go with a website builder option as opposed to a traditional web hosting option. There are definitely pros and cons to each approach. Going with a website builder will allow you to more quickly and easily create your website. On the other hand, if you want more freedom and control over your website, then it’s better to look for an established web host that offers platforms such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
Web Hosting Recommendations
Wix
For the quickest solution for creating your music website, Wix provides a large selection of great looking templates. More importantly, you have the ability to include audio samples of your music, videos, tour information, and with an eCommerce plan, you can even sell merchandise online. Here are some sample music sites created with Wix.
Click Here to See More Websites from Wix
Web Hosting Hub
While Wix is great in terms of speeding up the website creation process, there are some drawbacks. First, you’re locked into the Wix ecosystem, so you can’t move your site somewhere else. Also, you don’t have as much flexibility and control as you would using a content management system such as WordPress. WordPress is by far the most popular website platform around. While there are many web hosting companies offering WordPress hosting, for a music site we like Web Hosting Hub.
With Web Hosting Hub, you can choose from three levels of resources. If your music and your website suddenly become wildly popular, you can seamlessly switch to a higher resource hosting plan there. You don’t have to switch to a completely different type of hosting plan (such as VPS or Dedicated). And, with Web Hosting Hub, you also get the BoldGrid WordPress website builder.
BoldGrid greatly simplifies the WordPress website creation process. And, you can also choose from a large number of great looking website themes. Here are some music site samples from BoldGrid.
