You Band's Websites - Hosting and How Much?

not_the_dj

We need to set up a new band website (or we might just leave it as a Facebook only).

What hosting services do you chaps use, and how much does it cost you?

Cheers.

Danny1969

United hosting @ £5 a month ............. not sure it's needed now, Facebook has made it redundent 

not_the_dj

Danny1969 said:

United hosting @ £5 a month ............. not sure it's needed now, Facebook has made it redundent 

That's pretty much what we're thinking. We're generally a pub covers band but we do a few parties and weddings, but we don't market ourselves as that, just seems more "proper" to have a website, but £5/month probably won't be worth it.

Danny1969

not_the_dj said:

Danny1969 said:

United hosting @ £5 a month ............. not sure it's needed now, Facebook has made it redundent 

That's pretty much what we're thinking. We're generally a pub covers band but we do a few parties and weddings, but we don't market ourselves as that, just seems more "proper" to have a website, but £5/month probably won't be worth it.

I know what you mean. I've tried to make our site literally about that, it's targeted for weddings and parties and all the normal stuff like pissed photos from last nights gig go on Facebook.

http://www.thesuperheroesonline.co.uk/      you could probably use Free Parking to host your's for £2 a month, Our's is £5 but mainly cos it allows 500mb of space which used to be a lot but probably isn't now

digitalscream

Probably not much use to you, but I have mine on one of my Linode servers (same service I use to host this forum). I think that server costs me about £20/month.

RocknRollDave

In my opinion, what a band really needs in order to sell themselves is a good set of photos - regularly updated at gigs to show you are a busy, popular band that goes down well - and good quality video clips.

Get someone with a decent camera to come along to a gig and take a mixture of live and posed shots - don't be afraid of posed shots! - and look at the camera.

Facebook makes things a bit easier in that you can send people page invites, lock them into regular news by getting them to like you, etc....Then try and strike a balance between regular posts to keep your page active and not bombarding your likers with loads of posts that start to get annoying.

I would place spending money on a bespoke website as waaaay down your list of priorities.

oh and as ever with these things, I am preaching to myself too here, really need to pull up my socks on a number of the above points....

Grunfeld

RocknRollDave said:

In my opinion, what a band really needs in order to sell themselves is a good set of photos - regularly updated at gigs to show you are a busy, popular band that goes down well - and good quality video clips....

oh and as ever with these things, I am preaching to myself too here, really need to pull up my socks on a number of the above points....

Good points and a good reminder.

We have got the ubiquitous facebook page but we've also got this:

http://nakedapes.co.uk/

Which is £35 a year for the hosting (from Easily), and I bought the website template for $2USD because we didn't need anything too fancy.  Just something that would look okay on mobiles too.

We keep it up to date with the info etc.  Funnily enough I was sorting out the email yesterday because the template had a script which launched a contact form.  And of course for every legitimate enquiry there were a dozen Nigerian princes, Russian brides, and offers of supplements to make my nob so big it would need a f*cking red light on top.  So.... I'm quite chuffed with the groovy ASCII art email addy on this page which hopefully is bot-proof.

monquixote

I pay 5$ a month for a Digital Ocean server. 

I use it for a few different sites though.

EricTheWeary

We have occasionally had this debate. We have Facebook (run half arsedly by me) and twitter (which has a whole life of it's own but run by our singist) and I can't really work out what a website would add. I think it was Dave's point that a poor/ out of date website might even do more harm than good.

Danny1969

EricTheWeary said:

We have occasionally had this debate. We have Facebook (run half arsedly by me) and twitter (which has a whole life of it's own but run by our singist) and I can't really work out what a website would add. I think it was Dave's point that a poor/ out of date website might even do more harm than good.

It's SEO .... type in Hampshire wedding bands in google  for example and look at the results, there's a lot of work comes from that. Facebook doesn't do shit SEO wise as far a I know, it's internal based and linked to what it thinks is relevent to you 

Troy

What I like about FaceBook is that it puts the entries into my iPhone calender so I can see who and when they are playing in advance. Wish the pubs that I follow would all do that, makes my life that tad bit easier. 

Also, good to see videos on Facebook (sometimes you don't know what that band sounds like till you get to the pub/gig). 

EricTheWeary

Danny1969;1018632" said:

EricTheWeary said:

We have occasionally had this debate. We have Facebook (run half arsedly by me) and twitter (which has a whole life of it's own but run by our singist) and I can't really work out what a website would add. I think it was Dave's point that a poor/ out of date website might even do more harm than good.





It's SEO .... type in Hampshire wedding bands in google  for example and look at the results, there's a lot of work comes from that. Facebook doesn't do shit SEO wise as far a I know, it's internal based and linked to what it thinks is relevent to you 

Fair point. If you Google a band's name it looks like their Facebook page does come up so if it is somewhere to store photos, list gigs and to be able to direct people to it then Facebook does it; you can also link it to things like a venue Facebook.
I guess for us it would seem unlikely to generate paying gigs as we aren't really looking to play parties or weddings, etc.

simonk

Websites still have their place, see that as your sales brochure. Facebook, apart from mostly being a jumbled mess, makes for a useful day to day journal and a place to keep all the blurry photos of pissed people that you don't want those prospective and lucrative wedding planners to see immediately.
We use GoDaddy for ours and really don't pay a lot.

http://www.thesupernatural.band/