great man...when is the whole Custom template idea popping up?

that soo kick ass!

thanks!

Wow! This sounds great. The upgrades and new customizable
templates are going to be a big plus to all of us. Thanks.

Beatmaker E.I.

Nice Just like the DJ mentioned prior to me stating it here....do you have an ETA on the new flash and customizable templates features? Glad to see that 2.0 will be coming to fruition (hopefully soon

Sweet stuff man. Dude I want to beat up all of the politicians that made that change to the time zones...

Bandzoogle 2.0 sounds amazing - we are counting the days
until we have a fully customizable webpage. YOur templates are
great, but we would love to be able to personalize our page a
little more.

Good job guys and congrats on the big news.

This sounds great!

Thanks, guys! Sounds great.

bz rocks

...hot damn man Bandzoogle as a band totally rocks,thanks for all the great updates,
Love and Music.
GW

Tower 4,

Are you kidding? We get a few more months with more sunshine. I love it, and I'd think you would in So. Cal!!!!!!!!1

Yea I gotta say, once we can fully customize our own sites...to give them our own "stamp," Bandzoogle will take one more step closer to ruling the planet earth.

That's the only thing, in my opinion, keeping this service from being absolutely perfect.

Viva La Bandzoogle!

Thats what I like to hear. Bandzoogle in lightning speed

I really like the new control panel and speeding up the load times for pages is cool. I am looking foreword to the custom features you speak about. after turning on several band friends to bandzoogle at times even with your many options you can see a basic theme with all of your templates. I hope this change is coming soon as I have been with bandzoogle now for almost 2 years I need some custom themes for my site. I remember you guys speaking about this over a year ago and I hope it is coming soon. Can you give us any idea of a time frame for this custom set up?
I am in no way am griping cause you guys have a great product here or else I would not have over 15 band friends using your system.
I look foreword to this change and I hope you can give us more details... Thanks again guys for continuing to improve a great thing!

You know those scenes in bad sci-fi movies from the 1950s? Where they say, "If only they had used their gift for good instead of evil?"

Congrats, you did!

Great! This is what we ALL have been wanting!

GREAT!! Only been here a couple of weeks and love you guys already!!!

hahaha everyday this just gets sweeter and sweeter. Is there a projected date for the 2.0 version?

Hi guys,

There are too many factors that could alter the date so I can't set one in stone. I can only say both Eli and Colin are working full time on this project. We're also hiring a new full time designer to make it happen (http://www.bandzoogle.com/jobs.cfm )

I like the idea of customizable templates
and new music player

great work guys Papa J

Moving upward is always an exciting motion. Thank you.

I am really excited about this new change. Keep up the great work!

This is great news, You guys just keep getting better!
Thanks,
DJ
TFS

awesome

That is awesome news! Thanks for the update.

Chris:

I do believe this is "good news". But, and here I go again, I have to ask some questions.

Don't quite understand it fully but it sounds great if the pages are going to load faster,

thanks bandzoogle

that sound great! When is the new version going to be activated?

Sounds Great!!!

Good questions AG.

Thanks BZ. I know you all are confident in this transfer and feel it's the way to go. I have a feeling it's going to be slammin'!!!

I think AG's points are important enough to consider a back up plan if in the event the Amazons go A-Wall on us...

In response to your questions, American Gypsy:

Q: What does this mean in the way of "dependence" on an outside service (Amazon) as far as your span of control?
[and]
Q: Is something happens to Amazon, what will the impact on BZ be?

A: We will still be storing all of your media locally, and we will be able to very easily "flip a switch" to start serving your media off of our servers again. Since you're technically minded, you might be interested in the basics of our implementation of this "switching". Essentially each media file is flagged as being up-to-date on S3, out-of-date, or not uploaded at all. Those that are out-of date or not uploaded to S3 are still served off of our machines. Any encoding and processing is done on our machines as well. If S3 ever did go down for some reason, we could easily just start serving all files off of our servers. S3 is really just an extra layer to reduce traffic on our end and improve performance for streaming media. We aren't really dependent on it at all.

Q: [On the brighter side]...Will this make things any easier for those of us who already have streaming or sales offerings on Amazon?

A: I don't believe so, no. The S3 service is unrelated to Amazon's storefront.

Fair questions Dreaminghawk.

First off, we'll be storing all your media files locally as well as on Amazon. If something "happens" to Amazon, we can just flip a switch and stream them from our servers.

Now, the chance of something happening to Amazon is very remote.

The way their system works, your media file is spread across hundreds of thousands of server computers. If any one of them fails, the other are there to back it up. We have some "redundancy" in our systems, but not on the massive scale of Amazon.

All websites, from tiny personal homepages to Myspace.com rely on some outside companies to provide them with connectivity. There is always some degree of risk when you are banking on that company's existance to support your own.

Amazon is a well funded public company with a long (in web terms) track record for reliability. They are really the most reliable place we can put your files -- one of the reasons we are going with them. Moving to Amazon will cost Bandzoogle considerably more than keeping them on our existing servers; we believe that the reliability and performance boost is worth the price.

In terms of it affecting sales at Amazon, this is a totally separate thing. We are just renting space with Amazon -- it is not linked to their ecommerce systems.

Let me know if you have more questions about this!

oops, we posted at the same time.

Thats ok, I understood it better reading it 2 ways.

Thanks - both of you!

My questions were only based on so darn many years of experiencing even the best one's going either down or in a "different direction" - or selling to a bigger entity.

It is not really a matter of "trust"; it's a matter of dependency and control over our own stuff [not to mention having to rebuild or start over].

Your answers are good and I do understand. Thanks for being so direct about it.

On a side note, I even tried to set-up American Gypsy on my own server but found out just before going "server" that ComCast will not allow it. And, I'm not quite read to go to a T1 line of my own...

Again, thanks for all you do and for being so open.

Peace,

Dreaminghawk