Web Hosting for Wedding Photographers

The first question is always the date

Read your own enquiries back and the pattern is hard to miss. Before anyone asks about your style, your packages, your second shooter or whether you will stay for the sparkler exit, they ask one thing. Are you free on the fourteenth.

That is a yes or no question about a single square on a calendar, and your website is where it gets asked. Which means the whole site is really a funnel into one answer, and the quality of your galleries only starts to matter after that answer is yes.

Here is the failure this trade actually has, and it has nothing to do with servers. Two couples enquire about the same Saturday in June. The calendar lives in your head and in a notebook in the car. You reply warmly to both, because both are lovely. One of them books. Three weeks later the other one sends back a signed contract and a deposit for a date you no longer have.

What fixes it is a single calendar of record

Not a better host. One place where a date is either taken or it is not, that you check before you type the word yes, and that gets updated the moment a deposit clears rather than the next time you sit down at the desk.

• Pick one calendar and make it the only one that counts. Everything else is a copy, and copies go stale.
• Mark a date as held the moment money moves, not when somebody says they are keen.
• Give held dates an expiry. A verbal hold with no deadline blocks a Saturday you could have sold.
• If you publish availability on the site, put a date stamp next to it so nobody trusts a six month old list.

Some photographers publish an availability list for the coming season. It works, it filters out enquiries you cannot serve, and it is only worth doing if you will genuinely keep it current. A stale list is worse than no list, because it makes a couple write to you about a date you sold in March.

Galleries, and what hosting for wedding photographers should hold

This is the part people assume is a hosting question, and mostly it is not. Delivering a full wedding as original files out of your own hosting account is the wrong tool for the job. Use a gallery service built for client delivery. They handle the downloads, the print ordering, the client login and the sheer size of the thing better than a folder on a web server ever will.

What your own site should carry is a curated set. Twenty or thirty photographs from a wedding, properly resized, chosen to sell the next booking. That is a portfolio. It weighs very little, and shared hosting carries it without complaint.

Where photographers get caught

• Uploading camera resolution files straight to the site. A page pulling forty full size images will crawl on the car park signal a couple is browsing from at a venue.
• Treating the gallery service as an archive. It is a delivery tool. If your contract promises access for a period, know exactly what happens at the end of it.
• Having no second copy of the originals. A drive fails, and unlike almost every other trade you cannot reshoot the day.
• Letting old wedding galleries pile up on the website until most of the site is dead weight nobody visits.

The archive point deserves saying plainly. Website backups protect your website. They are not a photography archive, and a hosting plan is not where a wedding should live. Keep originals on your own drives with a second copy elsewhere, and read website backups as the answer to a different question, which is what happens when the site itself breaks.

How long you keep galleries online is a business decision rather than a technical one. Whatever you decide, write it into the contract in plain words and say it again in the delivery email. The conversation you want to avoid is a couple coming back in year four for files you removed in year two.

Who should not buy any of this

If your work is commercial, editorial, family portrait or headshot photography, most of this page does not apply to you, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

That work is sold from a portfolio. A client likes the pictures, you agree a date, and if the date clashes you shoot the following Tuesday instead. There is no single irreplaceable Saturday, so there is no double booking catastrophe, so all the calendar and contract machinery above solves a problem you do not have. What you need is a fast site that shows the work well, which is a simpler and cheaper thing. Our general photography hosting page is the better fit for that.

Even for wedding work, the honest answer on hosting is small.

• You do not need a large plan. The heavy files live with your gallery service, not on your website.
• You do not need extra storage sold by the host. If a photography site needs a lot of storage, the images on it are the wrong size.
• You do not need a security product on a site with no logins and no payments. Payments belong with the payment provider.
• You very likely do need somebody to resize a portfolio that went up straight off the card, and that is a one off job rather than a monthly one.

Spending more starts to make sense in a narrower set of cases. You run a studio with several photographers and a booking system living on the site rather than linking out to one. You publish enough that the site has grown into something substantial. You have been hacked before and want the site watched. Volume of weddings on its own is not a reason, and neither is the size of your camera files.