Winter Film Festival: How NYC Film Festival Rebuilt Its Website and Made Hosting the One Thing It Doesn't Worry About

Winter Film Festival, an independent New York festival run entirely by volunteers since 2011, screens up to 100 films and hosts around 35 events every February on a website one person built and maintains alone. 10 years on hosting.com (originally A2 Hosting), a full site rebuild, and one ticketing platform change later, that person describes the hosting side as the single thing on her list she doesn't have to think about. 

Website: winterfilmfest.org  

Industry: Nonprofit independent film festival  

Headquarters: New York City, USA

Background:

Steffanie Finn is not, by her own cheerful admission, a film person. She spent 30 years as a corporate IT project manager, won't watch horror because it gives her nightmares, and describes her taste in movies as terrible. In 2011 a filmmaker friend, frustrated that festivals were either celebrity-driven or "rinky-dink", set out to build one with the structure of a major festival and the heart of an event for emerging filmmakers. Steffanie helped with copies and graphics. Then, at the first party of the first night, she told him he really needed a project manager. He pointed out that she was one. 

Fifteen years later, Winter Film Festival is heading into its 15th edition, February 24 to 28, 2027 at Regal Union Square in Manhattan, screening between 75 and 100 films from around the world, hosting roughly 35 screenings, panels, mixers, and parties, and receiving close to 1,000 submissions a year, judged by a panel of 60. It remains all-volunteer and nonprofit. Steffanie makes the final programming decisions without watching a single submission, so as not to bias the process, and spends most of the following year catching up on the films she chose. 

The website exists to promote the festival: film profiles, event listings, interviews, and links out to ticketing and the submissions platform. It sells nothing directly. But it carries a lot of data, and for a one-person tech team with a full-time day job (until her recent retirement), that data had to be manageable. 

Challenge & Requirements:  

A Site That Couldn't Show What the Festival Was 

The festival started on GoDaddy, then WordPress.com, neither of which gave Steffanie the control she wanted. Most festivals just list a film title and director. She wanted full profiles for every film, event detail, proper sorting, and the ability to pull data programmatically from Salesforce, where all the festival's records live, instead of re-keying it. 

Burnout Risk From Manual Data Handling 

In 2018 Steffanie says she nearly put herself in the hospital juggling a full-time job and an unmanageable volume of festival admin. Automating everything she could that year was a survival move. A site that required constant manual updates wasn't sustainable. 

No Infrastructure Knowledge, No Budget to Buy It 

Steffanie is comfortable with data and SQL, and openly not comfortable with servers, routers, or "weird messages". The festival's budget doesn't allow outsourcing, so anything she couldn't do herself had to be something support could walk her through. 

Winter Film Festival was looking for: 

• Enough control to build custom post types and fields for films and events 

• A site that pulls data in cleanly and displays it many ways with minimal manual effort 

• Support that could translate infrastructure questions into plain steps 

Winter Film Festival has been with hosting.com, under its earlier A2 Hosting brand, since about 2016, and the site runs on a cPanel Shared Hosting plan. Steffanie moved over from GoDaddy (with a stretch on WordPress.com in between, as she remembers it) because she wanted a custom website with the necessary flexibility. 

The Solution: 

What hosting.com provides for Winter Film Festival: 

• Room to build and run the site herself, with the control she wanted for a WordPress.org site with custom fields for films and events 

• Clear answers during the rebuild, including how to make the new site go live, what to do with the old one, how to move things over, how to repoint things, and how to set up a second instance of WordPress 

• Help that matches what she needs: support either tells her what to do, sends links to documentation that isn’t too technical, or, when it still goes over her head, just does it or figures it out for her 

• Reassurance on error messages: when she hits one she doesn’t understand, she asks, and the answer is usually that it’s fine and not to worry 

• Someone on the other end if the site goes down: on the rare occasion it does, she tells support and someone figures it out, and she doesn’t have to do anything 

For a volunteer who builds the site herself and has no budget to outsource, that combination matters. She handles what she’s comfortable with, and support covers the rest. 

Impact:

Maintenance Reduced to Nearly Nothing 

The rebuilt site is, in Steffanie's words, about as low-touch as it could possibly be. Data goes in once and is sliced and displayed in whatever way the festival needs. 

Fast and Stable, After Years of Not Being Either 

Compared to the GoDaddy-era site, the current one is fast and has been close to bulletproof for a decade. 

Support That Never Needed a Second Ask 

Ten years without a support issue that wasn't resolved quickly and clearly, including a full migration Steffanie couldn't have done alone. 

Time Given Back to a Volunteer 

For someone running a festival on top of a career, hosting simply stopped being on the list of things to worry about. 

"It's fast. It's clean. It doesn't crash. It doesn't throw weird errors. It just runs. I don't have to think about it." 

-Steffanie Finn, Winter Film Festival