We were discussing website hosting with a professional musician friend recently because he was increasingly finding that his website was becoming an excellent promotional tool for his music. We discussed third party sites like last.fm and MySpace but before long the discussion turned to how he used his own site to provide MP3 files of some of his songs and how much he was paying for the privilege.
His site was hosted via Verio and he was happy with their service except for one thing - the price. He was paying $49.95 a month because, having used them with a cheaper hosting plan before he decided to add MP3 files for download, he had discovered that he needed to upgrade to their most expensive shared hosting plan before MP3 files were permitted.
A quick investigation revealed that many shared hosts, especially at the cheaper end, don’t allow MP3 files to be hosted at all. All the same, £25 a month is a lot of money to pay out simply because you want to host MP3 files! His site isn’t that large either, so he was paying for webspace he would never use.
UKCZ Hosting offered him 500Mb of webspace, which was ample for his needs, for less than £25 a year. Most importantly for him, it comes with MP3 file support as standard. Needless to say he jumped at the chance to host his site for about a twelfth of the price he was currently paying!
He was so impressed with the hosting service, he commissioned UKCZ Design to create a Wordpress template to match his existing site, and to correct minor errors with his HTML to make his site standards compliant too. The design office was filled with his music for a few days whilst we worked on his site, which was a bonus.
Who is this lucky musician? His name is Jamie Marshall and his site remains happily hosted by UKCZ Hosting.