Online Video Hosting:
I have had lots of problems finding an online video hosting provider for my videos. If you are reading these lines, you certainly need to host your videos somewhere and there are three solutions to consider. You can host them on a free service like Youtube, your own server or use a specific video server provider.
1) Online video hosting on a Free service
The most well-known service is Youtube. It is free and seems to be the perfect place as the videos you upload are well optimized and encoded. It is easy to embed the code in any page of your website and you benefit of the Social tools and community to be on this online video hosting service. The main problems are that the length of your videos are limited, they can be shared even if you don’t want to and there are adverts on them.
The major inconvenience for Internet Marketers like us to use this online video hosting service is that your videos or channel can be deactivated overnight.
It suffice that other people, concurrents for example, report you for copyright infringement or anything else, even if it is not legitimate and you are done!
You can appeal this, but it takes a long time before you have the service back… Almost all top Internet Marketers have experienced this nightmare at some point in their career.
There is another service called Vimeo, which is good, but you are limited in space for the free plan. They do have restrictions on the videos you can host even on the paid plan, and if you are promoting an MLM company or a legitimate business opportunity, forget them.
2) Online video hosting on your own server.
This solution seems like a good option, especially when you are already paying hosting for your website or blog. If you have a VPS or dedicated server it seems even better.
Using your own server is alright if you have just a few short videos with not so much traffic. If the hosting company is located in the USA and people in Europe or Asia access your website, your pages will show at normal speed, but your videos, which are much bigger files will load and stream slowly. They may not load at all and upset your visitors who will exit and never return.
This solution is OK if you have very short videos you have transcoded in flash and if your visitors are located in the same region your server is. If you have more videos and more traffic spread around the world, it will be wise to choose the next solution.
Specialized Online Video Hosting
3) Online video hosting with a video service provider.
There are many different online video hosting service providers and I believe they are for most of them very good. They generally offer many features and their own customizable video player for your site. The major problem is that their prices are expensive for the independent marketer just starting with videos. They mainly offer different packages with a limited storage and bandwidth that you pay for, even if you do not use in full.
The solution I finally kept and recommend is Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Used together with Amazon CloudFront, you will have the best option for your online video hosting.
With CloudFront, when an end user requests a video using a specific distribution domain name link, they are automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery. This is a great advantage as your videos can load and stream fast anywhere in the world.
A great benefit is that you can start for free with AWS Free Tier, which includes 5GB storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests with Amazon S3. After the trial period is over, pricing is very cheap and you pay for what has been used in storage and bandwidth.
Click Here for More Information on Amazon S3
The negative point I have is that it can be intimidating and challenging to use their service. You really need to do some reading and try to go through, especially with setting CloudFront. You will also need an external video player to install on your site, some are free and some are paid.
I hope that after reading this article you will be able to decide the kind of online video hosting that is good for you. In the next article I will explain how to optimize your videos for the web.
Michel Gerard
