Serving musicians and bands

3097 Dundas St. West
Rear Studio
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M6P 1Z9
(416) 767-9446
[ push 1 to leave message at the studio ]

Mahogany@brownman.com
 
 
 

Client Site List
See who's under construction . . .

Everybody should have a website.  The internet  is the single most effective method of GLOBAL communication and advertising that any musician could ever want.  Some guys want just a page or two with their bio and a picture... others want dozens of pages, rich with content with downloadable soundbytes from the CD and a photo gallery of their last tour... but all of you need the same 3 things - A SITE, A WEBHOST and a DOMAIN NAME.  These 3 seemingly innocent requirements represent alot of time and effort on both our parts, so the purpose of this site isn't to just quote my rates - but to educate you on what it is you're getting into and suggest as many options as I can.  My hope is that even if you don't hire me for your website needs, once having read through this site you'll be in a better position to help yourself.

Remember -- knowledge is power.

- BROWNMAN

1) The Site: 
I design, construct, program and implement at the following rates :

This is what I do -- build the car.  We meet, we discuss what it is you're looking for on each page of the site and what graphics and pictures you'd like to use.  I then go off and code the site and provide it to you on CD in HTML format or for an additional $15 I’ll upload it directly from my computer to your webhost and test each link.

2) Webhosts: 
There are places online that provide space on their machines for you to "park" your website for a monthly fee... called WEBHOSTs.  Their rates vary depending on what they're providing - some provide only a couple of megs of space, but unlimited "transfers" (also called "bandwidth restrictions") from your site.  A "transfer" refers to the amount of information transferred out of your site when someone visits it.  Let's say you have an audio clip that's 10 meg big and 50 people download it that month... then your transfers that month would be 500 megs.  Some webhosts have very strict bandwidth policies and may limit you to only 1 Gigabyte of transfers a month, which means that one audio clip being downloaded 50 times, would eat up 1/2 your bandwidth quota.  If your just starting out and don't anticipate a huge number of hits on your site initially, then you're unlikely to exceed this type of restriction, UNLESS you have large files on your site -- like high-resolution pictures or audio files larger than 10 megs.
          In my research many commerical Canadian Webhosts seem to start at about $20 a month.  If anyone knows of a Webhost that provides webspace and DNS service for under $20 a month - please let me know, and I will post that information here.

The MAHOGANY solution : $170/year for full webhosting on my ownserver
I can now offer a cheap solution for webhosting - I built my own server!  See below!

3) Domain-names & DNS:
Now it gets complicated and expensive for the average joe (and this fact has nothing to do with me!!).  The .com suffix is the most popular and is highly used by businesses, thus ISPs who engage in Webhosting (ie - providing your car with the parking spot it needs AND a license plate) charge big bucks.  Here’s why -- domain names are provided by a registrar, like InterNIC.  The registrar assigns these names to an owner for a fee of $70U.S. (this covers year 1 and 2… after that it’s $35 a year).  But the internet doesn’t understand these domain-names… it deals exclusively in a world of numbers - called IP addresses (ie. - www.easynet.ca = 124.35.543.12).  So here’s the kick in the pants - even though you can register the domain-name with InterNIC and are now it’s "owner", it is still the responsibility of the owner to find the DNS servers to translate the name into an IP address.  And generally, the ISP will want to charge you for their generous DNS services (if anyone knows of an ISP who doesn’t charge, I’d like to know about them). 
            If you  want some in-depth reading material on the subject you can take a look at the book 'DNS and BIND' by O'Reily and Associates.  The first few chapters will give you a good idea of how DNS works.

So here’s the total costs you’re looking to have a website with a .com name :

            1)  Website design fee..- build the car
            2)  Webhosting fee.... - pay by the month for your parking spot
            3)  InterNIC fee........- buy a license plate written in english
            4)  DNS server fee.....- pay to have your license plate converted from english to numbers
 

If already have a webhost and just need to have your DNS configured, I can:
...... .- Contact your Webhost to configure your account for webhosting
        - Deal with InterNIC registration and configuration (you must provide me with the fee, or I can bill you later)
        - Consult with your Webhost about setting up the DNS servers
        - Configure the InterNIC registration to reflect your Webhost's DNS servers.
        - Upload the HTML files which represent your site from my computer to your Webhost
        - Test all links
        - $70

The MAHOGANY solution : $170/year for full webhosting on my server
I can now offer a cheap solution for webhosting - I built my own server!  Here's what you get :

        - Your own domain name hosting
        - 5 GB (5000 MB) of disk space!
        - 100 GB (100,000 MB) of monthly data transfer bandwidth
        - Unlimited POP3 email accounts @yourdomain.com (ie - brownman@brownman.com, 
                   info@brownman.com, booking@brownman.com, freesex@brownman.com, etc...)
        - Configurable mail storage space limits for each account (make it 10 MB or 1 GB - up to you.)
        - Unlimited alias email accounts (ie - brownman@brownman.com could silently forward to
                   brownman911@gmail.com ... or where ever you want it to.
        - Web-based email access interface 
        - Unlimited email autoresponders 
        - Unlimited sub-domains (ie - storage.ritadighent.com or audio.ritadighent.com) 
        - Unlimited FTP access (24hrs/day) 
        - Server supports Javascript, Perl, PHP, SSI, Shockwave, Flash, MS Frontpage extentions
        - Server supports MySQL and PHPMyAdmin databases
        - Server has a UPS power backup (in case of power outage)
        - most importantly - I would be administrating everything... no third parties.
        - $170/year (well... it's actually $169.48 ... pardon my rounding)

SUMMARY:
For you to have a website on the net accessable to all, you'll need to work out 3 things -- (1) who designs your site, (2) who hosts your site and (3) how to attach a .com to it.  I can do all of this for you -- build the site, host the site and deal with .com registration and DNS configuration.  Or I could simply host the site, which you bring to me on CD.  Or you may already have a site built and a host ready to go, and you just need someone to set up the .com DNS configuration.  Whatever your needs -- let me know and we can have a discussion about what you'd like done, and what services I can provide you.

If you're here, it means you're a professional musician or artist -- just like me.  The goal of Mahogany Web Services is to inspire and foster artists helping artists.  I came up in Brooklyn, New York and the one thing I learned there, is that you need to be part of a community.  New York's just so big and so expensive and so daunting... one of the only ways to survive was to link arms with your peers and help each other.  That's the underlying spirit of this service - artists helping artists.  Looking forward to hearing from you.

A'ight... I'm out.  Peace.

- Brown