5 Best Hosting for Musicians & Bands
As a DJ or member of a music band, you want to promote your music or band online, and a personal or professional website is undoubtedly an indispensable tool for showcasing your work, keeping in touch with your fan base, and for promoting tours and concerts. Whether you want to create your own website or hire someone to do it for you, WordPress is a fast and easy way to get your work online. Thanks to its user-friendly nature, even if you hire someone to launch your website for you, with WordPress, it will come easier for you to learn the ins and outs of this content management system and to freely modify, update or add content to your music website, whenever necessary.
While there are other ways to create a music website and there are hosting providers that provide you specific tools to create musician websites, this article will focus on how to build a music site with WordPress, and which are the best hosting companies for musicians if you intend to choose WordPress as your CMS.
Here is the list of hosts that I recommend for hosting a musician, band, DJ, singer or artist website. My favorite is obviously BlueHost!
| Company | From | ||
|---|---|---|---|
# 1 |
 |
$3.95 / mo |
|
# 2 |
 |
$3.99 / mo |
|
# 3 |
 |
$1.99 / mo |
|
# 4 |
 |
$3.95 / mo |
|
# 5 |
 |
$3.95 / mo |
Building a Music Site with WordPress
In terms of website building, WordPress has the advantage of being a free to use platform that gives you a lot of leeway in choosing the design and functionality you would like to add to your website. You can use site builder tools purposefully created for musicians, however, these can be more expensive than using WordPress, and they can be limited in the features they offer as opposed to WordPress. The plethora of themes and plugins available for WordPress can help you accomplish virtually everything you can imagine for your music website.
Before you actually add any functionality to your website, it’s a good idea to think about the design of your website. On Themeforest.net, you can browse through hundreds of WordPress themes to choose the one that best reflects your band’s image and personality. Make sure you choose a responsive template, so your website is mobile-ready, and offers a great browsing experience on mobile devices as well. Some themes will have pre-built page templates that you can easily use to build your website.
Once you’ve chosen your preferred design, you can start adding some functionality to your musician website. The easiest way to do that is to use WordPress plugins, and thankfully, there is an abundance of plugins for musicians as well.
As a musician, you want your fans to come to your concerts and see you perform live. WordPress plugins like Event Organiser, GigPress, MF Gig Calendar, and GigsCalendar are specifically created to help you manage tour dates and related events. Some of these plugins let you add booking functionality, manage PayPal payments or add location maps.
Another set of plugins that you may want to check out for your band’s website are plugins for managing band photos, which can be a good way of building up a certain image of your band and market your upcoming concerts or performances. Image gallery plugins like NextGen are a reliable tool for uploading photos of yourself or your band in action. Create albums and slideshows so your fans can take a peek into your band’s activity.
Playing music on your website is another aspect that you should consider, and plugins like HTML5 jQuery Audio Player, Spotify Master, and SoundCloud Master are great WordPress plugins for displaying music, playlists and entire albums for the enjoyment of your fans.
Design and functionality are not the only things you have to choose for your WordPress music website, you also need to consider a good WordPress hosting provider that will deliver the performance you need.
Best Hosting Providers for Musicians
Our list of the best hosting providers for musicians includes companies that either have WordPress optimized plans or have great shared hosting plans that will meet the needs of small to mid-sized musician websites.
BlueHost
If you’ve chosen to create your musician website with WordPress, BlueHost is a top hosting provider for anyone with a WordPress site. Their smallest hosting plan costs only $2.95/month ($7.99/month regular price) and includes a free domain, 1-click WordPress installation, free site builders, unmetered bandwidth, and 50 GB storage space. If this Basic plan is not enough to meet your needs, you can choose from higher tier shared hosting plans such as the Plus and Prime plans, which come with unmetered bandwidth, unmetered website space, hosting for unlimited websites, and extra features such as $200 worth of marketing offers, spam protection, domain privacy (Prime plan) and backups (Prime plan). The discounted monthly price for the Plus plan is $4.45/month, while the Prime plan costs $6.95/month. All plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
For a monthly fee of $19.99 you can opt for a WordPress optimized hosting, which can keep up with 100 million visits per month and comes with SiteLock CDN for increased speed and performance. If you’re thinking of selling your music on your website and you need to process credit card transactions, a VPS hosting plan is your best choice. Higher tier VPS plans (wp premium and wp ultimate) at BlueHost come with positive SSL certificates.
If you don’t plan on selling your music on your website and you don’t have a high traffic music website, a shared hosting plan is a good start. A great advantage of BlueHost is that they offer a lot of flexibility in upgrading your hosting plan should your hosting needs change.
InMotion Hosting
InMotion is another must-consider hosting provider for WordPress music sites given that they offer one of the most comprehensive hosting services on the market. Their three business shared hosting plans (Launch, Power and Pro) offer free SSD drives, a free domain included, free data backups, 1-click installer and access to over 310 applications, SSH Access, 90-day money-back guarantee, and many more features that can be relevant for any WordPress powered website. Each shared hosting plan comes with free advertising credit to promote your website and have unlimited disk space and unlimited monthly transfers. Their drag and drop website builder tools, WordPress pre-installation and a variety of free themes makes website building a simple endeavor.
The Launch plan costs $5.99/month, the Power plan costs $7.99/month and the Pro plan costs $13.99/month. These are the currently discounted prices; regular prices are slightly higher. Each plan is purposefully created for different skill levels and hosting needs. For example, the Launch plan is a shared hosting devised for all skill levels, while the Pro plan is designed for developers and growing businesses. Their WordPress optimized hosting plans are an excellent choice for those wanting to build their own music website as their plans include the BoldGrid website builder, free themes, full design and hosting support.
For those needing dedicated hosting resources, InMotion has plenty of other hosting configurations to meet specific hosting needs.
iPage.com
iPage’s shared hosting plans are probably the most affordable ones you can find on the market, and they come with plenty of outstanding features and an abundance of freebies and bonuses. iPage currently hosts over 1 million websites, making iPage a very popular platform with WordPress users.
Their Essential shared hosting plan has an introductory price of $1.99/month and includes a wide range of features and over $500 in bonus features. This shared hosting plan is a veritable package deal that includes free domain registration, unlimited storage space and scalable bandwidth, unlimited domain names allowed, unlimited MSQL databases, and a plethora of designing and building tools (e.g Weebly website builder, mobile-friendly site builder, free templates and themes, 1-click WordPress installer, vast CMS compatibility, etc.), marketing tools and free credit (Google and Bing credit), and access to 24/7 customer support. iPage’s hosting plans are also backed by 24/7 customer support. The Essential plan is a good option if you want to build a smaller website to promote your music or your brand.
iPage also offer two WordPress optimized hosting plans, the WP starter ($3.75/month) and the WP Essential ($6.95/month) for increased control and performance of your WordPress site. Should your hosting needs change over time, iPage also has VPS and dedicated hosting plans to meet your growing hosting demands.
HostGator
HostGator is a WordPress-friendly hosting provider that is known for its affordable plans and endless list of features included with its plans, so all your hosting needs will be met. Shared hosting plans and WordPress cloud hosting plans are available for you to choose one to get started with your WordPress music site. Shared plans come with unlimited domains (some of the plans), unmetered bandwidth and disk space, instant backups, instant setup, 45-day money-back guarantee, $100 Google AdWords and $100 Yahoo/Bing credit, unlimited MSQL databases, audio-video streaming, SpamAssasin, cPanel, Real Time Updates, OpenSSH, etc. The discounted monthly cost for each shared plan is as follows: Hatchling plan starting at $2.43/month and Baby plan starting at $3.48/month. Their Business plan costs $5.23/month and comes with private SSL and IP, as well as free VOIP phone service.
Their WordPress cloud hosting plans (starter, standard, and business) include global CDN with fast load times and multiple caching layers, automatic malware removal, free migration, advertising credit, WordPress Cloud interface for enhanced usability, auto-backups and one-click restores for ultimate performance and security.
SiteGround
Our list of the best hosting providers for musicians concludes with SiteGround, another feature-abundant WordPress friendly hosting provider. A great thing about the plans offered by SiteGround is that they are constructed in a way to meet hosting needs depending on the size and nature of the website you wish to host with them. Their shared plans all include the following core features: enterprise class server hardware (SSD servers for ultimate performance), free website builder, cPanel control panel, free daily backups, free CloudFlare CDN, free Let’s Encrypt SSL, one-click WordPress installation and 99.9% uptime guarantee. This hosting environment is ideal for hosting your WordPress music site.
Their shared hosting plans are named according to the size of the website they are able to host, thus, SiteGround offers the following plans: StartUp ($3.95/month), GrowBig ($5.95/month), and GoGeek($11.95/month). Each plan has specific features in terms of storage and bandwidth, as well as the number of websites that can be hosted on one account.
For more resource hungry CMSs or music websites that also have an eCommerce side, we recommend checking our SiteGround’s VPS plans.
Conclusion
While the hosting providers presented above don’t have hosting plans specially created for music sites, their WordPress plans are an excellent fit for WordPress music sites. Shared hosting plans are the most affordable hosting plans for your music website, however, music websites with high traffic spikes and eCommerce functionality would better benefit from a VPS hosting plan. Depending on your current needs and available budget, you can always start with a basic shared plan and upgrade your plan later on, should the need arise.
