Best Web Hosting Providers for Musicians and Bands!

Last updated on February 12th, 2021 at 11:49 am

So, you and your band are thinking about taking things to the next level and start promoting your music on the internet.

One of the best ways to do this is by building a Website since this will not only allow you to send people over there to listen to your music, find out when the next gigs are coming up, etc…

But it will also give the band a much more professional image, which is definitely something you would want to do.

I have personally used multiple hosting providers, from the cheapest to even some premium ones that are lightning-fast…

This is why I will only tell you about the ones that I have used and what I did- and didn’t like about each of them.

It’s worthy to note that there are hundreds of hosting providers out there and most of them provide similar services…

The thing is that some provide almost identical services yet they charge almost twice as much.

So, today I’ll go over the best ones depending on what your needs are, from cheap to not so cheap, and from kind of slow to extremely fast.

But first, there’s one important thing I need to cover which is…

Get a domain for your Website

Without a domain, you don’t have a Website.

Most Hosting providers give you the option to buy the Domain whenever you’re choosing a hosting plan…

But you should never go for this…

You should always keep your domain and your hosting separate.

If you purchase the domain with your hosting provider, it will be much more difficult to migrate do a different host, if you ever need to…

This is why I’d recommend you get your domains on a domain registrar website.

Here is the one I’d recommend;

• NameCheap.com

This Domain registrar is great and allows you to easily point the DNS to another host if you ever need to migrate your site.

Let’s get right into the hosting providers now…

Hostgator

This was my first hosting provider ever!

The reason?…

They are cheap, plus the visit per month limit is much higher than on other hosting providers even though they are charging you less money.

Important note: Make sure to click on “Web Hosting” on the menu and not “WordPress Hosting”…

This is because the latter one is much more expensive even though you can still install WordPress once you hired any of the Web hosting plans.

Plus, you can only host three sites with the most expensive plan, while on the other hand you can host unlimited websites on the “Baby” plan under “Web Hosting” at half the price.

So, let’s look at the prices real quick:

You can choose between the Hatchling, Baby and Business plans.

I wouldn’t even think about hiring the business plan if I was only building a website for my band, it’s just overkill.

So, the actual two viable choices are the Hatchling and the Baby plans…

Here’s a quick comparison of both:

Important note: All prices present a discount but only in the first term.

This means that if you hire a plan of 36 months, as soon as the plan renews it will be much more expensive simply because those discounts don’t apply again.

It’s usually about twice as much…

Same goes if you want to upgrade from one plan, say the Hatchling plan, to the Baby plan.

You will get the first one at a discount, but you won’t get any discount on the upgrade…

So, think carefully when deciding what plan to go for.

Which plan should you choose?

To properly choose a hosting plan you should mainly think about these three things;

• How many visits do you expect?
• Do you need more than one website?
• What is your budget?

How many visits do you expect?

25.000 visits may seem like a lot, and in some cases, it is…

But think about what happens when you share your music on social media.

If just one of your social media posts goes viral, you can expect a huge influx in traffic in absolutely no time…

This will eat up your monthly limit very quickly.

However, you can also upgrade to the next plan instantly if your Website is about to reach the limit.

With the Baby plan you can get up to 200.000 visits which is A LOT… if you ever get close to that number then you’re probably doing extremely well!

Moving on…

Do you need more than one Website?

This definitely isn’t everyone’s case, but you may be also thinking about creating additional websites, maybe for personal use or to promote other bands you’re in.

In this case you should absolutely choose the Baby plan since it allows you to host an unlimited number of websites.

The Hatchling plan, on the other hand, only allows for one…

And lastly…

What is your Budget?

First let me say that I think you should get the 36-month plan, no matter if you choose the Hatchling or Baby plans…

This is for the simple fact that the discount is massive and you get three years worth of hosting, after which you can upgrade to a better and faster hosting provider.

But, if you’re on an extremely tight budget, then the Hatchling plan is the one you should go for.

Otherwise, I think that the Baby plan is just better overall.

Pros of Hostgator

1. You can upload files to the “File Manager” of up to 500mb and people can download them without any limit whatsoever…

What this means for you is that you can upload your CDs and have people download them without any restrictions.

I even contacted the support team to confirm this and they did.

I did not, however, test the download speed.

2. A lot more visits per month for less money than almost any other hosting provider.

3. Customer service is actually pretty damn good.

4. Reliable: I’ve never even had 1 minute of downtime in the three years that I’ve used their service.

5. $100 worth of Bing and Google Ads credits (For each of them) which you can use to run ads for your band.

Cons of Hostgator

1. Slow loading speed… but hey, it’s super cheap!

2. I had hired the Hatchling plan and later decided to upgrade.

As I went through the upgrading process, I didn’t click the confirmation button but they had already upgraded to the next one and charged it to my credit card.

I didn’t like that one bit!… seemed a bit shady.

Who is Hostgator for?

If you are building this website to gain some traction for your band and don’t care too much about how fast the loading speed is, then by all means, go with Hostgator.

Like I mentioned previously, their service is very reliable, if you have any issues you can contact the support team and they will fix it for you…

Plus, they are super affordable and provide good plan options.

Next on the list we have…

Siteground

I hosted two different websites on Siteground that I had built for one of my parents…

I actually liked their service quite a lot, especially since the loading speed is much faster than Hostgator.

Both of them are very similar in the sense that you can access a cPanel and manage the backend through it.

Installing WordPress is also very easy and straightforward, just like on Hostgator.

However, there are some pretty important differences between SiteGround and Hostgator…

The most important differences lie in the price and in the number of visits you get per plan.

So, let’s take a look at the plans they offer first;

You can choose between the Startup, GrowBig and GoGeek plans.

The issue with SiteGround is that the number of visits allowed per month are really low compared to Hostgator, plus all of their plans are actually more expensive.

This means that in order to be able to handle 100.000 visitors a month on SiteGround you would need to get their highest plan, which costs twice as much, or more, than the Baby plan offered by Hostgator, which can handle 200.000 for just $5.95.

Here’s a quick comparison of the two most affordable plans they offer, which should be enough for you to at least get started;

Important Note: Just like with Hostgator, all prices present a discount but only in the first term.

This means that if you hire a plan of 36 months, as soon as the plan renews it will be much more expensive simply because those discounts don’t apply again.

It’s usually about twice as much…

Same goes if you want to upgrade from one plan to another since the upgrade won’t have any discount applied to it.

Which plan should you choose?

Again, you need to ask yourself a couple questions in order to know which plan to choose;

• How many visits do you expect?
• Do you need more than one website?
• What is your budget?

How many Visits do you expect?

Like I mentioned, both plans allow you to have 10.000 and 25.000 visits per month respectively.

That’s not a huge number, but it’s a good starting point.

10.000 does seem like a lot, but it’s just about 333 visits per day, which if you promote your band on social media every day, then you will probably hit that limit in no time and need to ugrade.

Do you need more than one Website?

If you are in more than just one band and you want to promote both of them, it makes much more sense to get the Growbig plan instead of multiple Startup plans.

Since you can have unlimited websites hosted with the GrowBig plan, it ends up making a lot more sense.

What is your Budget?

First of all, if you’re really trying to host a website in the cheapest way possible…

Just go with Hostgator.

However, if you think that the Startup plan that SiteGround provides will be enough, and you don’t want to compromise on site speed, then by all means, go with SiteGround.

Pros of SiteGround

1. The loading speed of the site will be quite a lot faster than if you were hosting it on Hostgator.

2.The customer service is excellent; They fix everything in a matter of minutes.

3.Reliable uptime. I’ve never had any issues with the service not working.

4.You can upload your music via FTP and have people download it for free, with the only limitation being how much you can store on your account, which you can see in your cPanel.

Cons of SiteGround

1.This didn’t happen to me, but I know of people who went over the visit limit and their website was shut down to preserve resources.

2.When I created the E-mail accounts, it wouldn’t let me choose how much storage I wanted to allocate for each account.

They all had a 250mb limit and once that limit was met, all the older e-mails would get deleted once a new one came in.

3.More expensive and less visitors allowed than with Hostgator.

Who is SiteGround for?

SiteGround is somewhere in between Hostgator and Cloudways, which is the last hosting provider I’ll talk about.

It’s pretty fast, very reliable, and provides excellent customer service.

The reason to choose SiteGround over Hostgator is if you want to have a fast website at an affordable price but you don’t think that you will reach the visit limit.

Like I mentioned earlier…

SiteGround is much faster than Hostgator and you may want to provide your visitors with a great and fast experience, even if the visit limit is much lower.

And lastly…

Cloudways

Ok, now we’re entering the big boy’s league…

I’ve migrated every single website I own to Cloudways simply because they are amazing.

It’s not your traditional shared hosting, like Hostgator and SiteGround…

But rather a managed Cloud Hosting platform.

These services provide the fastest loading speeds of all, and the big difference is that they don’t cap your visit limit.

Not only is this service extremely fast, but it’s also way more secure than shared hosting.

Here are some of their plans;

You actually build a “server” and decide how much RAM, Storage, etc. you want to pay for.

The cheapest plan costs $10 a month and you get 1GB of RAM, a 1Core Processor, 25GB of storage and 1TB worth of bandwidth.

Now, imagine that the average page on your website is 1mb and you have 1tb worth of bandwidth…

This means that you can get roughly 1 million visits per month while only paying $10.

Pretty cool, right?

The one issue is that all the extra services like having email associated with your website, etc. are not included and cost $1/mo. per e-mail account.

Now, let’s answer the same questions I answered for the other two hosting providers;

• How many visits do you expect?
• Do you need more than one website?
• What is your budget?

How many visits do you expect?

Like I just mentioned, even with Cloudways’s most basic plan, the number of visits should NEVER be an issue.

Do you need more than one Website?

Cloudways works in a different way than the both hosting provides I just described;

Once you have your server, you only need to create applications (WordPress Sites in this case), which are completely unlimited.

All you need to do is point the DNS from the domain registrar to your server’s IP and that’s it.

But you can host as many websites as you’d like as long as the server’s resources can handle them.

What is your budget?

Cloudways is a bit more expensive at first, mainly because you don’t get those huge 60% discounts on your first plan like you do on both Hostgator and SiteGround…

However, once those plans renew and the discounts are no longer applied, they end up costing around the same or even more…

With the huge difference that Cloudways is just much more powerful.

Pros of Cloudways

1.Blazing fast speeds.

2.Great customer support, I’m actually very happy with how fast they answer your questions and fix anything that needs fixing.

3.You don’t get a visit cap.

4.Very reliable uptime.

5.You can upload whatever you like and have people download it as long as you don’t consume the 1TB bandwidth completely.

If you go over the limit, however, they will only charge you a bit extra depending on how much you ended up needing.

Cons of Cloudways

1.Not as easy to use, especially if you’re used to the regular cPanels.

It took me about two days to fully understand how everything works.

Once you get used to it, however, it’s pretty simple and you can create websites in no time.

In fact, if you’ve never used a regular cPanel, Cloudways can be easier to learn, I think…

Who is Cloudways for?

To be honest, Cloudways may be a bit overkill for most of you…

However, if you want the best service possible, while still not having to spend a fortune, then it might be your best option.

You won’t get better results with any other Hosting provider, that I can guarantee.

So, if you’re absolutely certain that you’re going to get thousands of visitors and you want to provide them with the absolute best experience, then use Cloudways…

Otherwise, SiteGround and Hostgator are completely fine!

Which hosting provider should you choose?

If you read through the entire post then I assume that you already have a pretty good idea of what you need, however here’s a quick summary:

Hostgator; Go with them if you want the cheapest alternative that also provides you with a high monthly visit count, if you don’t mind compromising on the loading speed.

SiteGround; If you feel like your visit count won’t be extremely high but you still want to give your visitors a fast and good experience.

Note: SiteGround is a bit more expensive than Hostgator and allows you to get fewer visits per month.

Cloudways: If you want to provide your visitors with the absolute best experience possible and don’t mind spending just a little more (It’s not actually that much more in the end).

Like I mentioned earlier, I ended up moving all my Websites to Cloudway simply because I wanted them to be as fast as possible so that my viewers don’t have to wait 6 or 7 seconds until it loads.

Plus, I feel like the overall service they provide is just better.

Where to get the hosting services?

Here are Links to every Hosting provider on this list;

• Hostgator
• SiteGround
• Cloudways

Conclusion

No matter which one you choose, you are going to get a great service without having to pay too much.

Building a website is exactly the same on every single hosting service, the only difference is how you install WordPress on them.

After installing it the steps are identical.

Like I said, I absolutely love Cloudways, but both Hostgator and SiteGround are great as well…

And don’t forget to register your domains with a separate domain registrar like GoDaddy and Namecheap if you want to have an easier time migrating your sites later on.

I hope this was useful!

Have a wonderful day!