One of the questions that came through in the Facebook group earlier, well I guess last week actually, was around “Video Content on Websites” and whether or not to host that on YouTube, self-host it etc..
So, I just wanted to touch on that and a bit more detailed than what I was able to do and posting an answer through Facebook or on the group itself.
Effectively, there are, there are two types of ways you can go about hosting a video content on your website,
• The first is self-hosted.
And that is where you actually upload it to your server or to the same server that your website is hosted on.
That will obviously take up space on the server, and depending what your contract is with your hosting provider that may or may not end up beefing out how much you have and whether or not you can actually fit any more on their, or be able to do backups successfully and so forth .So, there’s definitely a few downsides which I’ll touch on later.
The other is using another “Hosting Platform or a Video Hosting Platform like YouTube, like Vimeo, and Adilo and a huge number of these.
So, Which one should you pick and when?
Well, firstly when it comes to self-hosted videos, there are times where this is going to be a good idea and they are few in five between.
To give you an idea, I’m working on a website for a client who is selling subscriptions to the video content. For that, we are deciding to do self-hosted video because it is all about that video content and we want as much control as possible over those videos and what’s on them, how they’re hosted, the speed.
Basically we want to control everything we possibly can, so we’ve decided to use self-hosted videos and have created a whole unique server for that experience.
Now, when would you choose YouTube?
So, YouTube is an easy video hosting platform, It’s designed for sharing videos. Effectively, they do reduce the quality of your video ever so slightly.
For the majority of things you’re not going to notice this so if you’re uploading videos like this one here, you won’t notice the decrease in quality from YouTube’s compression.
But if you’re uploading a video that is of text for example, there’s a lot of small texts or spreadsheets then that is where its gets a little bit more tricky and you are going to notice that depth and quality.
So, YouTube is great for videos for the majority of people, it’s easy, you can restrict a little bit.
Basically there is your public option, the unlisted option which means it doesn’t show up in Google searches or YouTube searches but can be found if someone has the link. So if you post it on your website, it’s as easy as right click and go and copy link.
And then they can share that and anyone and everyone has that YouTube video or YouTube link so if you don’t want other people see it without paying for access or if it’s private whatever, that’s not a good idea.
Then you have other subscription-type sites where other hosting sites like Vimeo, and I mentioned Adilo which is a relatively new’ish one, up and coming.
They have options to restrict it even further. So they do actually cost money as supposed to YouTube which is free. But Vimeo for example we have the Plus Pro and business account which I’ll use to restrict who use it, what websites can basically put an iframe on it or use as a widget.
So if you are looking at something like providing video content where you want to control which websites are off and it goes on, who can see it, that sort of thing, then Vimeo is great for that.
It also does allow you to add custom intros and outros which is good for a platform. And gives you the ability to monetize or demonetize videos, as you wish.
There are some restrictions with something like Vimeo for example where they do, do their own compression so there is that issue. There is also the fact that, even though it is hosted on another platform, Vimeo’s optimization isn’t as great as YouTube although that is getting better and better and better, so the downgrade and quality is slightly worse ever so slightly.
Most people won’t notice to be honest, but again if you are going for those sort of text, heavy spreadsheet videos where you’re showing off how to do certain things then Vimeo is probably not going to be the best bet.
And then you have places like Adilo which are designed specifically for video hosting and reduce the amount of compression or you can pick a level of compression.
So, for the majority of people, host it on YouTube, host your videos on YouTube, embed it.
Chances are we’re talking about testimonials we’re talking about things like this sort of video where I’m just talking to people so that sort of thing will allow us to throw it on YouTube.
It doesn’t cost us bandwidth, It doesn’t cost us service space on our self-hosted server, It also allows us to go, “Hey you know what let’s throw a link into the YouTube video” and getting to miss your benefit.
You also have a benefit of YouTube seeing the fact that there is a video on your website or sort of Google seeing the fact there is a video on your website even though it is embedded from somewhere like YouTube or Vimeo.
So you have no downside when it comes to SEO, for using YouTube vs self hosting, and you get the benefit of it not slowing down your site overall which can happen with self-hosted videos.
So, YouTube and Vimeo and other hosting platforms use a specific way where they only load certain components of the video as you go forward and it makes it a lot easier, whereas, if someone loads a website with a full self-hosted video on there, it will try and load the whole thing, regardless of whether or not they hit play.