Hosting Your Band Website

To Free Host or Not To Free Host

Now that we’ve established why you want your own domain name, let’s talk a bit about the type of hosts that people use. There are many free web hosts out there that will give you a good amount of space for files. In addition, many people nowadays host their band pages on community sites (such as myspace or friendster) or journal type sites (blogspot).

The obvious benefit of course is that they are free. However, let me play devil’s advocate and argue why you WOULD NOT want free hosting.

First: Control. When you are using a free hosting site you are completely at the whims of whatever setup they have. This may or may not include, page banners, popup banners, links out to specific sites and auto-framing of your webpages with a “webhost” nav bar. All of these can be extremely annoying for users and in order to get rid of some or all of them, you will have to UPGRADE. Yeah, that means pay money. And if you’re going to pay money anyway, why not pay what amounts to a few dollars more a month and get a real host?

Secondly: Web space and bandwidth. Since you are of course in a band, it is only natural that you will want to store both pictures and sound files (such as MP3s). One thing that many people forget is that these webhosts place limits not only on the actual amount of space you are allotted for files but also the amount of bandwidth you use.

What is bandwidth? Whenever someone downloads one of your MP3s and images, or for that matter visits any of your pages, that transfer of information is counted. You have a limited amount of transfers that you can perform per month (or sometimes week, or day). If you go over that limit, then your free host may block all future incoming requests for the rest of the time period.

Now, for many non-media heavy sites this is no problem. But for band sites especially, where the MP3s in question are extremely large, the transfers can add up fast. You may find yourself running out of bandwidth after only 20 people download a file! I have had that happen to me before and it is not fun.

Third: Features. This is sort of linked with having “control” over your website as above. Basically, if you want to do anything really cool and different (homemade cgi scripts, forums, polls, streaming music, etc.) that requires getting into the server, you will most likely not be able to do it with a free host. Whether or not you know how to set these up yourself is a moot point. Even if you paid someone to set you up one of these special features, they would not be able to do it unless you were hosting on your own.

Some free hosts and communities (particularly those like MySpace and CdBaby), ARE set up to run special features such as streaming music. You might want to take a look at what’s out there. In general though, they offer a SET amount of features… if you make your own or find one that you’d like to install, chances are good that unless they offer it, it won’t be doable.

If you think that none of these exceptions apply to you, then free hosting might be a way to go.

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