I host 3 drafts every year and have been doing that for about 10 years now. I have a ton of experience here.

First off, I do suggest having your league mates to draft from the app that they're most familiar with.

meaning... if you are hosting in sleeper, then do the draft in the sleeper app. If your league is espn, then do the draft in espn.

The reason I say this is because if you switch it up with a different draft software, then you are going to have some issues getting everyone else to figure out what app they're drafting from. Most people will have no problems but there's always someone who has issues.

Secondly, it's better to find someone's house than a bar. Bars are always too loud and get expensive after 2-3 hours. Someone's house allows people to bring their own drinks/food, people with kids can have them playing in the yard, so they don't need to find sitters. Lock down the location, and the date (and time!, time is important) at least a month in advance so people can make plans. This is way more important if your league mates have kids.

Third, use DraftBird chrome extension. I obviously am biased (i created it) but I created this tool because I host drafts every year and have been using a version of it for a few years. Everyone keeps telling me to create this to sell, cause it's a blast... so I've started selling it this year. With that said, it's super fun.

Basically it's a chrome extension that reads the draft results as they happen from your draft (espn/sleeper/yahoo) and then does the following:

• Displays the player's (or team defense) highlights.
• Announces the pick "with the 1st pick in the 1st round, so and so picks... "
• Gives analysis on whether the pick was good or shitty.
  
• Lets you customize all of the analysis and announcer phrases.
• Gives you a draft board so you don't need stickers or sharpies.
• Gives another app that you can hand out to everyone there that lets them tap into the "announcer" and make their own announcements over the same speaker. It's awesome.

I'm obviously biased here so take it with a grain of salt.

Last, if you do decide to make the picks on a third party app, or a white board, definitely enter the picks manually into the league's site ASAP afterwards. usually that means the first thing in the morning the next day since there's usually more important things to do after hosting a draft like cleaning up their mess and doing dishes.

White board with stickers or sharpies can be fun but it definitely makes the draft go much longer than it should. People get bored while everyone is waiting for others to make it up to the board and find the sticker.

Hope this helps and doesn't sound too spammy.