Web Hosting for Art and Music Schools

Short answer: art and music schools have one hosting requirement nothing else in education shares: audio. Recordings of ensembles and performances are what convert prospective students, and audio is the one media type people routinely self-host and should not. Get that right and the rest is an ordinary school site.

Looking for plans rather than guidance? Our education hosting plans start at £39 a year and renew at £39, with SSD storage, a CDN and daily backups included.

Audio is the requirement people get wrong

Video is well understood: everybody knows to put it on YouTube or Vimeo. Audio is not, and MP3 files get uploaded straight into the WordPress media library because they seem small enough.

They are not, in aggregate. A ten-minute recording is around ten megabytes, and a page carrying six of them is sixty. Worse, an audio player streaming from your own server holds a connection open for the whole playback, and several visitors listening at once is genuinely more load than the same number reading pages.

Use a dedicated audio host, SoundCloud, Bandcamp or similar, and embed. It handles the streaming, adapts to the listener’s connection, and costs you nothing in bandwidth. Keep your own server for the pages.

If you must self-host a few short samples, keep them short, encode at a sensible bitrate rather than uploading studio-quality WAV files, and never put more than two on a page.

Recorded auditions mean large uploads

If you accept recorded auditions or digital portfolios, that is a genuine hosting constraint rather than a detail.

A default WordPress install caps uploads well below the size of an audition video, and there are three limits involved: WordPress’s own maximum, PHP’s upload_max_filesize, and PHP’s post_max_size, which must be larger than the file limit or uploads fail regardless. Raising the first without the third produces a failure that looks like a broken form.

Ask your host whether those can be raised. If they cannot, that determines how you take submissions, and the better answer is usually to ask candidates to upload to a file service or an unlisted video link and send you the URL. That removes the limit entirely and keeps large files off your server.

Ticket releases create the sharpest spike in education

Your concert and production calendar attracts the general public, not just prospective students, and it behaves differently from the rest of the site: nothing for weeks, then a concentrated burst the morning tickets go on sale.

Two things follow. Use an established ticketing platform rather than a plugin, because a box office failing on release morning is a bad day and the plugin holds payment data you would rather it did not. And have page caching in place so the event listing itself survives the browsing surge.

Our plain English guide to Core Web Vitals covers how load speed is measured.

Storage, and what accumulates

Exhibition photography, production images and performance recordings build up every term and nothing gets deleted. Check your allowance and how it scales, and bear in mind WordPress creates several resized copies of every image you upload.

Keeping audio and video off your own server is what stops this becoming a problem, since media files dwarf images.

Your enquiry and audition forms

Forms fail silently: they submit, the sender sees a confirmation, the email never arrives, and nothing looks broken. WordPress sends mail through PHP by default, which is frequently filtered.

Send form mail through authenticated SMTP, add SPF, DKIM and DMARC records to your domain, deliver to a monitored address, and test monthly with an attachment as well as without. Our guides to contact forms not sending emails and SPF, DKIM and DMARC cover both.

Our email hosting plans include unlimited mailboxes with 10GB each, which matters here because audition correspondence carries media files.

What plan you actually need

Entry-level shared hosting works, provided audio and video sit on specialist platforms and your upload limits can be raised. SSD storage with generous headroom, a CDN, free SSL, daily backups. Around £39 a year.

Self-host the media instead and you will need considerably more, which is the argument for not doing it. Check the renewal figure rather than the introductory rate; our guide to cheap web hosting in the UK covers what should be standard.

Frequently asked questions

Can I host audio recordings on my own website?

You can, but you should not beyond a couple of short samples. Streaming holds a connection open per listener, which is more load than it appears. Use a dedicated audio host and embed.

Why do recorded auditions fail to upload?

PHP limits. Both upload_max_filesize and post_max_size need raising, and the second must be larger. Better still, have candidates send a link instead.

Will our site cope with a ticket release?

The listing pages will with caching. Put the ticketing itself on an established platform rather than a plugin.

How much storage will we need?

More than a typical school for images, and far more if you self-host media. Keeping audio and video external is what keeps the requirement modest.

Explore more

Our guide to web hosting for schools covers requirements common to all school types, and our guide to theatres and arts venues covers the ticketing spike in more depth.

Our education hosting plans start at £39 a year, with a free trial if you want to test media performance first.