Hosting Your Own Videos

If you own a website that displays a large number of videos you may be tempted to host the video files on your own server along with the website and other files. After all you host all the other website files there so you could be forgiven for thinking that this would be the more professional course of action. You would however be wrong. Here’s why.

 

The most obvious reason is your host servers bandwidth. Compared to static image files such as JPGs and PNGs a video file is very large. It can easily be over 100MB meaning that every time someone uses it they are using 100MB of your monthly bandwith occasion. Even more worrying, multiple visitors to your site could start watching the video at the same time. This won’t just cause problems for your monthly allocations, it will also affect the viewing quality that your users experience. The videos will take a long time to load and pause unexpectedly while playing as the bandwidth restrictions choke the download.

 

Another hosting related issue is the restriction on file sizes and your allocated storage space. Most web hosts will restrict the upload of file sizes to 50 MB meaning that any videos that you uploaded would be limited to short clips. Even if there were no limit to your file size uploads there would of course be an overall storage limit for your hosting plan which would be very quickly eaten into by 100+ MB files.

 

As a developer another issue that you will face is that there is no unified video file format for HTML5. This has resulted in the various Internet browsers adopting their own preferred video file versions. So this means that Firefox will play Ogg or WebM videos, but not H.264. However Internet Explorer and Safari will play H.264 (MP4) videos, but not WebM or Ogg. What this means for you is that you will need to encode about six different file formats for each video on your site. So that’s six times the file size to host.

 

What’s the alternative?
Rather than hosting the video files on your website’s host server, you should instead host them on a third party video host such as YouTube or Vimeo. You can then just place the embed code on your web page. That way all of these issues are avoided.

 

But what if you don’t want these videos to be visible on another website?
If your website’s source of financial income is based on paid content then having them visible for free on another site like YouTube is of course going to be bad for business. For example your site may be educational with tutorial videos that you do not want people to see elsewhere. In this scenario you can get yourself a Vimeo Pro account for US$ 199 per year. Vimeo Pro allows amongst other things, advanced security settings which would allow the video to display on your website but not theirs.

 

So in conclusion make life a lot easier for yourself and don’t host your own video files.