Last updated on March 24th, 2017 at 02:27 am

Should you use a free website from Tumblr or WordPress or Wix for the early days of ?your indie film? You should register on those free services to grab your brand name. But I wouldn?t go live with that for anything other than a teaser or short.

What about getting your own hosting account and running something like WordPress self-hosting? Things have changed, don?t host your own software or blog.

If your film is a short you can select the free hosting from Tumblr, WordPress, Wix or any of those free top level domains. However if you are going to make more than one short film or a bigger project, you should get a top level domain at least in your production company name. So if your making ?My Edgy Short? for the ProdCo Philberts Phantastic Philms you should register a domain name PhilbertsPhantasticPhilms (.com or whatever).

For a feature film or series you should register the brand name you are promoting MyEdgyIndieFilm (.com or whatever).

Until now the best advice was to then get a hosting provider for up to $10 per month and self host your website on that. WordPress was probably the easiest software to self host with and most hosting providers will install it for you. However I no longer recommend doing that.

Instead you should should pay WordPress.com or Tumblr.com or Wix to remove the ads and point your domain to their hosted solutions. Why? Automatic security updates! When you self-host software someone has to make sure it?s constantly up to date, because bad-guys are always looking for insecure sites to hack or worse to host their phishing scams from. Even if you are a competent sysadmin or website admin you have better things to do with your life than checking for updates all the time. No it?s not hard to do, but every minute you spend not making your movie, promoting your movie or aggregating your audience is time wasted.

So don?t buy plain generic or typical web-hosting to run your website. You wouldn?t set up your own web-server, so why would you run your own software? Pay a big player and point your own domain to their infrastructure. It will handle attacks better as well as scale sudden popularity.

Another solution is search on ?Managed WordPress Hosting?. Read about the companies that?specialise?in that space.

Photo credit Gesture 2 by Sanja Gjenero, Zagreb, Croatia