Soundshed - The Backroom

Eagle eyed readers will have noticed that our site was completely unavailable from the 24th to the 28th. This was due to a technical problem (i.e. we installed windows x64 2003 service pack 2 and the machine didn't restart. boom!).

Our host 1and1.co.uk where not entirely helpful as they could have help an awful lot more (i.e restored the files we needed) but alas they didn't respond to our pleas. We foolishly lacked the correct remote backup and suffered appropriately. Our apologies to all of our readers and most especially to our Full Members who have paid for more access to content. Several Full Member accounts were unrecoverable and they have been refunded where appropriate.

Needless to say we've learned a few valuable lessons and we hope we haven't pissed off too many users!

After about 5 years with fasthosts we've now moved to a private server hosted by 1and1.co.uk - teething problems are to be expected but looks ok so far.

This will have an effect on our ranking within google as previously we've always been on a subfolder of www.webprofusion.com, and now we're a fully fledge host in our own right. So we'll see if things go up or down!

We expect to do a few tweaks soon once the rollout has settled down. Plans for something of a styling reset are afoot as well as listing upgrade features.

That's us! Or so some people would have us believe. Apparently to some we are the new spawn of Satan incarnate because we charge £4.99 for a Full Membership to Soundshed.com (Actually we make £3.88 but that's VAT and PayPal charges for you). Full membership gives you complete access to peoples contact details details and gives every other registered member (paying or otherwise) access to your contact details. The alternative is you contact them through leaving a message on their listing or glean alternative contact details from their ad such as a myspace website etc. We don't allow contact details in the body of an ad simply because you'd be publishing your complete contact details on a public website without any safeguards, then we get complaints when people's mobile numbers appear on Google! So we protect those details and also use them as an incentive for people to purchase Full Membership.

Some people think charging for a service is fine, some think it's evil, and some don't care either way. So we have a common problem - how to fund a popular website, keep it going, grow it's popularity and even pay others to advertise it, without charging the users?

For the moment we can't see any good alternative to paid for Full Membership - advertising on the site generates a tiny amount of revenue - we'd make a lot more money doing a paper round - and if your not at the top of Google that's not going to change quickly. The membership fee's themselves are fairly small too but are enough to pay for the site hosting and some advertising. These fund wouldn't pay the wages of a real full or part-time web developer, luckily I (Chris) am such a thing so I do it for free when I get the time.

Opinions on such matters from Soundshed users are always welcome, we're not looking to alienate anyone who genuinely cannot afford the £4.99 for a full membership and alternatives will always be considered.

Someone else said we weren't charging enough - I wonder how a price increase would go down! Nope, we won't do that.

We're currently drawing up some new ideas for features in our popular musicians classifieds service www.soundshed.com. At the moment the following are high on the list:

• Clean up site design
• Get hosting moved to dedicated URL - we currently share the same server.
• Make use of real URL's instead of just database ID's in URL
  • This should make pages easier to identify when looking at Google results.
• Searching for musicians by proximity from your own location
  • This relies on the quality of Postcode/zipcode information supplied by the members using the site but should be great in general.
• A new feature to get notifications of new Album releases by your favourite bands - never again will you wait 6 months before realising a new album is out by one of the many bands you like! We'd find it useful so we think others would too - any takers?
• Gig swaps wanted/available - a good way to network with bands you don't know in your area and around the country. Anywhere in fact, imagine arrange a world tour from the comfort of your web browser! Should be easy we just need to get time to do it. Again, feedback on the type of stuff people would like to see would be useful.