Problem Description
- You have a video file that you wish to upload to your website
- You're wondering if it's better to host a video file locally on your Websavers hosting or use a 3rd party service like YouTube or Vimeo and embed it on your website
Problem Resolution
The answer to this question can vary depending on your use case. However generally speaking, it's best to use a 3rd party video hosting service. Here's two reasons why:
- Compatibility: Video hosting services like YouTube and Vimeo will automatically convert your video into a number of different formats and then serve the best possible format to the website visitor based on what browser and OS they're using. This ensures everyone can view the video and it also optimizes bandwidth usage, particularly for those on mobile. If you upload those video files directly to your hosting with us, some devices may not be able to play them, although this is becoming less common with HTML5 video capabilities built in that most content management systems like WordPress now use.
- Storage: videos are the largest type of file format around, larger than audio only files and far larger than photos and text. Those who upload lots of videos to their hosting will ultimately end up eating up larger amounts of storage which could eventually result in reaching your maximum hosting storage limit. In some cases you can pay more for storage, but some plans, like our Titanium plan's 50GB is the maximum we can offer on shared hosting because of our high performance solid state disks. This means that upgrading disk space will get very costly as you need to transition to a VPS of your own for expandable storage. Using a 3rd party video hosting service will negate that additional storage cost.
Note that an alternative to using a 3rd party video hosting service, while still hosting your own video files, is to use a service like Amazon S3 for video storage. If you're using WordPress, see here for a plugin that helps you do this.
