Bandzoogle Review: 8 Things To Know Before You Use it!

Bandzoogle is a web hosting platform which is exclusively dedicated to musicians. It provides tools for musicians to build a professional website, promote music as well as selling direct to fans.

It provides tools to support integration with social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp.

Bandzoogle also includes a built-in store, mailing list tools and reporting features along with dozens of themes and templates.

It was first launched in 2003 by a musician Chris Vinson who also created a website for his rock band named Rubberman.

Bandzoogle has its headquarters in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. This is popular amongst musicians and more than 30,000 musicians and bands use it.

Bandzoogle: Pros

Let me talk more about the pros of using Bandzoogle.

• Performance and Speed: Bandzoogle has a cloud infrastructure and is built to provide high performance for heavy design websites. It has the ability to quickly render video and graphics.

   

  Since this is dedicated to musicians, extra care is taken to provide sufficient bandwidth with no choking. It restricts users only based on pages, tracks, and photos. Apart from this, there are no other restrictions. The hosting platform supports scalable and rapidly growing websites.

  Below is the performance of the website, which is excellent.
  To check the latest stats of uptime for Bandzoogle, click here

  A similar test for the first byte is as shown below. This is also equally fast.

Needless to say, Bandzoogle is feature rich and makes website creation extremely simple. It has some easy to use drag and drop options which can be used easily by even a novice user.

• E-Commerce Ready: The basic plan supports most of the rudimentary features required for a music website. All the plans have support for e-commerce. You can sell music downloads easily using this.
  
• Mailing List Built In: Also supported is a mailing list with a minimum of 100 fan subscribers for the basic plan. You can quickly connect with your fans using their mailing list feature.

   

  The feature enables professional emails, scheduling of emails and analytics along with email reporting.
  

  Other features included are tour calendar and SEO tools. These are few features which are not readily available in other hosting platforms.

• Press Kits & More: Each plan supports Electronic press kits and has SSL security. The more advanced plan has loads of additional features.
• Advanced Features: Few of these features included are video headers, inventory tracking, sound scan reporting, album pre-orders and many more. You can sell tickets, merchandise, video files, and media files.
• Built-in Web Design Tools: Bandzoogle supports powerful web design tools with features such as an image manager, Instagram integration, font library and many more. Overall it is feature rich to develop a musician’s website.
• Trial Period: With every plan, you get a 30-day free trial. Most of the hosting platforms do not support such features. So yes indeed it is a win-win situation.
  Once the trial period is expired, you can easily upgrade to any of their paid plans. The plan includes the free domain name.
• Discounts: Bandzoogle provides attractive discounts. If you choose to pay annually, then you get a discount which is equal to two free months.

  If you have a free domain, then after 60-days of membership, you can opt to move elsewhere.

  Bandzoogle provides a non-profit discount. It offers free accounts for registered charitable organizations focused fully on music.

  All you need to do is, sign up for a free account and send email to Bandzoogle with information about your organization.

  Skip everything and Claim for your discount now…

Bandzoogle provides a lot of data insights by implementing effective reporting which can render interactive data analysis.

Bandzoogle has a unique feature to provide location targeting. With this feature, you can target fans in specific locations with customized email.

Bandzoogle: Cons

Now, let’s talk about a few things which, in my opinion, Bandzoogle can improve.

To be honest, there aren’t too many downsides to using Bandzoogle.

They claim to be a musician hosting platform and this is something that they are good at.

Few of the cons are-

• Add-ons: When it comes to a custom email inbox, this is not part of the plan. So email hosting has a separate pricing of $14.95/year.

Again none of the plans upright support multi websites. Multi-site has a separate pricing for which you need to get in touch with their account specialist.

Features

Ease of Use:

The cPanel available in Bandzoogle is easy to use even for novice users.

See the Bandzoogle demo below:

 

Once you log in, you can easily edit and add basic features.

This also provides multiple e-commerce support. From here you can add the latest news, latest track and details about your upcoming shows.

Editing the templates is easy and you can add pages easily. The cPanel also allows you to edit templates, generate various reports and add email campaigns using the mailing list feature.

Templates:

Your music website would be incomplete without using the best templates.

 

The templates need to be eye-catching and this is exactly what Bandzoogle caters to.

Well, all of these are indeed mobile responsive. The templates are well-segregated based on the music genre. It supports a large number of themes and you can also add your own theme.

 

You can easily preview your choice of theme. This also provides you with a mobile-based view.

All of this comes with an easy to align and use customizations.

Drag and Drop features:

In most cases, music websites have heavy UI and largely depend on media and video uploads. To use all these features, in most hosting platforms, one needs to do some level of coding changes.

Contrary to this, Bandzoogle provides interactive and innovative UI design which is perfect for your musical website. At the same time, this does not require any coding expertise.

The complete web designing uses an easy to use a website builder with drag and drop options.

Making any customization using these drag and drop feature is extremely seamless. Along with these drag and drop features, there are several demo videos which are available.

Once you make these changes you can quickly look at a preview of your website for desktop, tablet, and mobile.

Customer Support:

When it comes to customer support, you can reach the Bandzoogle team using email or live chat. You can use the email at all times. The live chat is not available 24/7.

In case the live chat option is unavailable then you would get a popup as shown below.

Bandzoogle does not provide a live chat option at all times, probably a reason being their extremely simple to use cPanel.

Over their cPanel, you will find multiple demo videos which can be used as a reference guide.

Further to this I also tried their live chat option. It was extremely fast with no wait time.

The live chat representative was quick enough to provide sufficient information and relevant links to provide more information about the different features.

Apart from this, Bandzoogle has a blog section which has various interesting contents across different topics. You can also register over here to get regular updates.

Pricing:

Bandzoogle has 3 different plans. The 3 plans are-

 

 

(Free 30 day trial, no credit card needed.)

 

Email hosting can be opted for at a separate pricing of $14.95/year.

Overall Bandzoogle offers affordable plans. The basic plan includes an array of features.

Bandzoogle vs Wix

Now that I have provided a walk through about Bandzoogle, let me compare this with another popular hosting platform “Wix”.

Wix is also a cloud-based hosting platform, similar to Bandzoogle. It was first launched in 2006 and has its headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Wix is a universal hosting platform as compared to Bandzoogle which purely focuses on musician based websites.

However, when it comes to creating a musician website, let me provide you a comparison between Wix and Bandzoogle.

Conclusion

I have given a detailed walkthrough of Bandzoogle. Also provided a comparison with Wix, which happens to be a tier two choice to create a musician’s website.

Bandzoogle is dedicated to catering the needs of musicians alone and this is exactly what they claim to do. Indeed, it is a perfect choice if you are looking out for music based website hosting.

It has a good performance, speed and is scalable. These are some of the features you would look out for, since creating a musician website is heavy on UI. Bandzoogle provides the most accurate tools to help you create a professional website.

Bandzoogle not only has an attractive template collection but also has an intuitive cPanel which is easy to use and has drag and drop features.

Your website can be up and running in a matter of minutes.

Well, that is not all. Bandzoogle supports easy editing of your website and additionally provides analytics using its reporting tools.

Overall Bandzoogle is a truly recommended choice for a musician website.

So, go ahead, get your Bandzoogle hosting today!

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