5 Best Hosting for Musicians, Singers, Bands, Artists & DJs
Being a musician is important to have a website. In this article I will show you how to build a website by your own and also how to choose the best hosting for musicians website.
If you are the type of person who likes to do things by itself, probably you also want to build your own website. So you are good at music, but have no clue on how to start a website. That’s ok. If you have the willing to learn how to create your own music website or a website for your brand, read through this page, I will explain everything below.
There are couple of web hosting providers specialized in providing tools for making musician websites. I choose to not include these in the list, because they are expensive and the functionality of their tools are limited. Instead I choose to present you 5 of the best shared hosting companies, which can be used to build a professional musician website for less.
When building a website and you are not a developer, you have quite a number of options to choose from. You can use a website script that is built for musicians, or you can use a more versityle software such as WordPress. WordPress has all the necessary tools that are needed for building a unique and feature-rich music site. On top of that, Beyonce and other musicians run their website on WordPress.
If you are looking to create a simple website for your band, you might opt for a website builder, which I don’t endorse too much.
The great thing about using WordPress or a site building software for your site is that you don’t need to know any coding. So without the need to know HTML, CSS, JS or PHP languages, you can build the whole website by yourself.
If you choose to create your site using WordPress, you need a good web hosting for it.
The 5 Best Hosting for Music Websites
So here is the list of the top 5 hosting providers I recommend for music websites:
- iPage – from $1.99 / mo
- BlueHost – from $3.95 / mo
- InMotion – from $3.99 / mo
- HostGator – from $3.95 / mo
- GoDaddy – from $2.99 / mo
In the following, I will go into details about each hosting company that I recommend.
iPage – Make a Website for your Music Band
iPage is one of the best and inexpensive options to create a simple musician website yourself. The company offers drag-and-drop site builder, with lots in-built functionality and customization options. You can choose from hundreds of ready-made templates (including music related designs) and customize them for your requirements. Editing a pre-created theme helps you create your website faster.
If you want more flexibility and decide creating your musician website with WordPress, iPage is a great option for this too. They offer a one-click WordPress installation tool, which enables you to get started fast and easy.
The Essential Plan is just perfect for starting a website for your music band, however you can upgrade anytime to a higher tier hosting plan if required.
BlueHost – Create a Music Website
BlueHost also has a website building software, but this tool only allows to create up to 6 pages. In my opinion you should opt for BlueHost if you want to create your website using WordPress. They are very strong in hosting WordPress websites. BlueHost has been recommended by the WordPress community and WordPress.org official website for a very long time.
BlueHost is one of the best WordPress hosting companies, and they have multiple hosting plans to choose from. For a starter musician WordPress site, you can use one of their shared plans. Later you can upgrade to more powerful hosting plan, as your website grows, and as it requires more server resources.
WordPress is one of the best software to build a website with. Its core functionality is very standard (allows to publish articles, upload images, create custom layouts easily), it is not specially created for musicians, rather for bloggers and small business websites. However with the use of special plugins and custom themes you can turn WordPress into any type of website (including musician profile website, music band, website for DJs or music store site).
So if you want a reliable hosting service for your WordPress site, BlueHost is the right choice.
InMotion Hosting – Start Your Musician Website
InMotion Hosting is another great option if you choose WordPress for your website. The offer a very unique website builder tool, which integrates with WordPress; it is called BoldGrid. This is actually a set of plugins that are available for install with each InMotion hosting account. BoldGrid is free to use, but in order to get access to this powerful WordPress extension, you need to purchase a hosting plan.
BoldGrid is perfect for beginners, who have lack or no programming knowledge, but want to create a website themselves. If you are interested in this plugin, you can learn more about it on our BoldGrid review page. In short, BoldGrid is a complex and powerful page builder for WordPress, that allows users create landing pages easily (drag-and-drop builder) and insert forms, maps, images with the press of a button.
You can have your WordPress site up and running right after account activation. On the checkout page you will need to opt for “Pre-Installed WordPress” for automated setup. This won’t cost you extra, it is included for free. This is a great feature if you want to start your music site fast.
HostGator – Setup and Grow Your Music Site
HostGator is a “beast” when it comes to web hosting. Different industries choose HostGator for hosting their small to large websites. Many musicians, music bands, DJs and artists also choose this hosting company because it is reliable and offers very good tech support.
HostGator also offers one-click installation tool that makes it quick and easy for users to setup their WordPress music site. At HostGator you can upgrade your hosting plan as your website grows.
Choose one of their shared plans to get started and switch to cloud or VPS hosting once your website gets more traffic or needs higher security.
If you don’t want to use WordPress for building your site, you can use the Gator drag & drop website builder. Personally, I don’t like website builders too much, but if you want to get the job done quickly, this tool might be the perfect option for you.
GoDaddy – Build a Musician Website
GoDaddy is a great choice for newbies and for hosting small and medium traffic websites. GoDaddy is versatility when it comes to building your website: you can choose the website builder offered by GoDaddy or you can opt for a hosting plan where you can setup your website with WordPress or other tool you might use for creating your website.
The Website Builder will offer an easy way to create, edit and publish a website. You can choose from hundreds of free templates and customize them for your needs. There are tens of designs that are specially created for music related websites. Each part of the design is editable: you can replace the sample images with your own, change logo, add and remove pages skipping the programming part entirely.
The Website Builder provides many options and widget to make your website professional looking and functional as well. You can easily add image and video galleries, tabs, boxes, implement a blog or enable the e-commerce function.
If you choose to create the website using WordPress, I recommend checking out the linked tutorial. If you choose one of GoDaddy’s cPanel hosting option you will be able to one-click install WordPress to your domain and start building your website right away.
Your job will be to add a theme, install the necessary plugins, add pages and posts; which are very easy to do. At the end of this page will give you a list of recommendations for what plugins and themes you can use for building a professional looking musician website with WordPress.
Which Host Should You Choose for a Music Website?
We’ve enumerated the top 5 hosts that we consider being the best for hosting a music website. Each hosting provider has its pros and cons, so you should choose the company that is best for your needs. In my opinion for smaller, startup music websites iPage is the best option. For websites created with WordPress I recommend BlueHost, InMotion and HostGator. GoDaddy is also a great option for hosting a music website.
You can learn more about each hosting company by reading our in-depth reviews.
Now let’s take a look on how to create a music website with WordPress.
Useful WordPress Plugins for Music Website
As I reported above, the core WordPress has not enough features to create a music website. But with use of special plugins you will be able to add music players, a shop, a music library or other great features. All you have to do is to browse the WordPress Plugin Repository and search for music.
In the results you will find all the necessary plugins that you might need and these can be installed to your website for free. Here are few useful plugins for a music website:
The Simple Music Widget plugin enables you the option to display a music player as a widget with the option to add artist’s name, song, album, short description and cover image to each track. This widget will work on all browsers that supports HTML5 audio element. It is definitely a great widget to have on your website if you want to let your visitors listen to your music before they purchase it.
Another great plugin is Gmedia Gallery, which is a all-in-one media manager as well. This plugin works as a library, providing a comprehensive interface for managing not only images but also audio files. With the use of this tool you can upload as many photos and music files as you like, and arrange them into groups, playlists and albums. It is a very useful plugin that might worth installing to any music website.
Have only mentioned two plugins, but there are hundreds you can choose from. When you select a plugin, always check the ratings and the last update of the plugin. You don’t want to install outdated plugins to your website. Avoid those that has not been updated for years.
Top Music Websites Built on WordPress
There are many musicians, singers, DJs, bands and artist who choose WordPress for their website. Here is a list of the most popular:
- http://www.katyperry.com/
- http://snoopdogg.com/
- http://www.esm.rochester.edu/
- http://llcoolj.com/
- http://a-ha.com/
Best WordPress Themes for Musician Website
So if you have decided to create the website with WordPress, here are few premium themes you can use to make your website unique and outstanding.
Anything else?
I think that I gave away all the information that you need for starting your website and I really hope that this article helped you to find the best musician hosting provider. If you still have any questions, please use the comment system below. I will try to answer all of them.
For a while my music band and I was planning to create a website, but never really got that push. Thanks to your great tutorial I realize that building a website is not as hard and I can do this myself.
I was able to create a website for my band using WordPress in one week. This system is very easy to use and eHost makes it even easier to set it up and manage the website. I really appreciate the effort and time you put into this website for helping out beginners like me!
Wish you the best! James.
We are not a very popular band, but we receive quite a big amount of views to our Youtube channel and we play in local pubs as well. We also have some covers and recently launched our first album. Our manager suggested that we also need a website besides our social and Youtube channels.
So, he contacted few web design companies to ask for an offer. When I saw the prices these companies ask to create a website for us I just got mad. I can tell you, that the cheapest offer was $2.500 plus yearly maintenance! This is two time more expensive than my Fender guitar, which I use on daily basis for work. That is just ridiculous!
So I did some research online to see if there is a cheaper way to create a professional website for a music brand. Thankfully I found this great article and decided to build the website myself. I decided to use WordPress after watching couple tutorials on youtube. It is very easy to use even by a non-techy person like me.
We choose eHost.com for hosting our website because it is affordable and has lots of features that we want to use. We also purchased a theme that had a very close design to what we wanted. The chosen theme allowed me to customize the website. The result was fantastic and my band liked it a lot. On top of that, we have spent less than $200. The only cost we have to take in consideration is the renewal for our web hosting plan. That is it!
Thanks for this great article and thanks for saving us lot of money! Have a great day!
I’m currently with godaddy, have 2 blogs setup, and all of them responses really slow to any clicks. Even the admin portal runs slower than as it should.
Please tell me what should i do..??
Thank you..
There could be many reasons you experiencing slow-downs on your websites: unreliable hosting, server location, internet connection and others.
If your internet connection if fine and other websites you access (ie. Facebook) runs quickly, then this is not the problem.
Server location could be a problem. As far as I know Godaddy’s servers are located in the US, so if you are accessing the website from outside the US, for you might load slower. I suggest checking your website speed using Pingdom’s speed test tool.
Last but not least, bad hosting is the most common reason why websites are slowing down. While we don’t have much experience with Godaddy’s hosting services, I can’t really tell if this is the problem. From what I read online, many people reported similar problems with Godaddy, so it might be your host, but not 100% sure. If you are looking to change hosting provider and your running your blogs on WordPress, I recommend BlueHost, which is the best cheap WordPress hosting provider, in my opinion.
I second what WHM Staff said: Bluehost is one of the best cheap hosting out there right now and imho Godaddy is one of the worst :(. I’he bad experiences with them and I’m not going back. You’d actually be better off using a free website builder like Weebly instead of using GoDaddy. The downside of a free Weebly account is that your website would look like mymusicsite.weebly.com – they also have paid options but going with Bluehost might be better. It all depends on your plans and budget.