Another option is to self-host, which means running your own, servers. These here modern times are not like the olden days of Bulletin Board Services (BBS) when thousands of people ran their own BBS servers from PCs in their bedrooms. Maintaining a website, hosting your own downloads, and offering streams of your work are all feasible for the do-it-yourselfer but are not for the faint of heart or the technophobe. Bandwidth is the biggest problem: If you want to house your servers in your home, first find out whether you can get adequate bandwidth for a reasonable price and whether your Internet service provider will even allow you to run servers. Then you are responsible for your own security, software, hardware, and system and network administration. It is satisfying to be the boss of your own servers, but it does require a lot of skills.
A better option is to use a good hosting service that has all the tools you need and gives you a good deal on bandwidth. It’s hard to beat a good hosting service on bandwidth cost, since they buy in bulk and spread the cost over many customers. Then the hosting service handles hardware problems, Internet connectivity, security, and backup power. Plans range from free for a basic low-traffic site to inexpensive shared hosting (which means one server with a limited amount of Internet bandwidth serves many customers) to paying for your own dedicated, unshared server. You can get started cheaply and upgrade as you become more successful.
Note
Remember WebHosting Talk (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/) for learning which hosts are good and which ones to avoid.
The free/open source software world has everything you need for running your own websites. Use the Linux operating system because it is robust and secure. Then there are bales of great servers to choose from:
Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, and Plone are all examples of excellent open source content management systems (CMS). These are the frameworks for the content that you want to put on your site so you can easily organize and post articles, photos, calendars, news, forums, and links.
Icecast and Campcaster are excellent open source streaming Ogg Vorbis and MP3 servers that you can embed on your website.
Shoutcast is a closed, proprietary streaming server, and Shoutcast Radio is a fast and free Internet broadcast service for hosting your streams. You can also embed Shoutcast streams in your other sites.
Many web hosting services offer Icecast and Shoutcast streaming and, of course, many other streaming media servers. Any hosting service offers a big bundle of server software and a nice graphical control panel for everything. If they don’t have a particular piece of software, ask whether they will install it, and if the software is free-of-cost open source, they probably will. Most hosting services rely heavily on open source software because it is free or inexpensive and because it is good.
Selling things online can be as simple as having a website and a PayPal account for accepting payments or a mailing address for checks and money orders. Check and money order fraud are rampant to the point that it may not be worth accepting either one. PayPal is easy and popular; just be sure you understand its fee structure so you don’t get surprised at the myriad ways it nibbles away chunks of your money. Google Checkout has lower fees than PayPal and doesn’t have PayPal’s reputation for inconsistent, unfair dispute resolution. You can use both, which will capture more customers since many of them will not want to sign up for one when they already have an account at the other.
Processing online credit card payments requires a sophisticated infrastructure. You don’t want to be one of those shops that makes headlines when some teenager hacks your customer database and steals all the information. Consider using a prefab storefront that has all the payment processing already in place. Start at Amazon.com (http://www.amazonservices.com/content/sell-on-amazon.htm); it is reputable and reliable, and it posts all of its prices and policies, so it’s a good starting point for research and comparisons. Amazon does not directly sell independent music but partners with music distributors like CD Baby and TuneCore. Having an Amazon storefront might be a good venue for your band swag and getting more visibility and another way to generate CD orders.
You can avoid payment hassles by hosting only free downloads and streaming on your personal site and then linking to your wares on CD Baby, Songcast, or whatever distributors you are hooked up with.
The one piece that almost everyone forgets is customer service. How are customers going to contact you when they have questions or problems, phone? Email? Who is going to respond, and can you count on them to respond quickly and in a way that keeps customers happy? If you are selling physical items like CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, and other branded merchandise, who is going to pack and ship them and how fast? Customer service is everything. It costs at least ten times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer happy, no matter how great your artistic genius.