This is the second part of a three part series on using video with WordPress. In part one I talked about Using Video With WordPress. Why you should use video and the benefits it gives.
In this part I would like to talk about where to host your videos.
Videos Are Big
Videos pack a lot of data into their files and as a result they are huge. You need to give extra special consideration to where to host these very large files.
Slow loading or juddery (is that a real word) videos are very annoying to watch, and your quality video content could be impacted by poor service from your hosting choice and turn off your viewers.
Host It Locally
You could upload your videos to your local hosting account and serve them up from there, but if you have a limited use hosting service you may use up all of your space and bandwidth, worse you could incur huge overuse charges, please check your hosting agreement before you host video files locally.
The extra bandwidth and resource you use could also slow down your entire site, so hosting your video files locally is not recommended.
Video Services
There are a number of video hosting services out there. A far better idea is to upload your video to one of them and let them take the bandwidth hit and resource usage. Let them stream your video smoothly, it’s what they do, their hardware is design to cache and play video correctly.
Here are some of the major video services out there.
YouTube – The big player in the video hosting world, YouTube is a great palce to host your videos. It’s free but the downside is that you can only have videos of up to 10 minutes, if you want longer videos, you need to look at something else.
Viddler & Vimeo– these are premium video hosting services, with a free option for shorter videos. This may be a good altenative to YouTube if you want longer videos, but you will have to pay for the subscription.
Amazon S3 – I bet you didn’t know the online retailer Amazon also sells storage and hosting solutions. I use Amazon S3 to host my videos for the WP Owners Club. These videos are typically up to an hour long so YouTube is no good to me, so I have opted for them. It’s a premium service that you pay by usage rather than a subscription. I host huge files and pay a fraction of the price for a viddler or vimeo account.
Keep Copies
If you are hosting your videos on third party sites I always recommend that you keep copies of your content. If you break T & Cs you may find your account closed down and your videos lost to the world.
Next Up
The next post in the series will show you the plugins and tricks I use to add video to WordPres posts, pages and into your theme files.
Image by adpowers