10 Reasons to Avoid Hosting Your Own Videos
Tags: hosting, video, videos
Published: 2022-11-08 21:43:43

In this article, I will mention 10 reasons why you should implement embedding, instead of using your own site to host videos unless you have a powerful server with Hight performance. This article focus on shared and slow hosting packages.

**1. Hosting a Video on a Shared Host VS Embedding Video**

Embedding a video is actually the recommended method to proceed. When embedding, you are essentially using a third-party website like YouTube and Vimeo. You upload your videos there, copy the path to them, and then paste the video path to your website.

Hosting videos on shared server means that the video is stored on your own website which can result the following issues:

-Videos that are not compatible

-The videos are slow because of your limited bandwidth

-Your video stops playing intermittently

-Including a host of thumbnail images and perhaps a few audio clips as well which will eat your storage space

**2. Higher Bandwidth**

Bandwidth is the amount of data available (per month) for transfer from and to your hosting account. Every time someone downloads a 40 KB file from your website, they use 40 KB of bandwidth from your account. The same rule applies to videos that you host on your site.

When you start sharing videos that you have hosted on your own website, and people start watching them, the amount of bandwidth used by your site will increase. This has several adverse effects, notably server speed and cost.

**3. Performance and Speed**

When your videos receive a large number of real-time views, it can have an adverse effect on your server’s performance. Having your website’s response time slowed down by your host is not optimal. However, this is exactly what may happen as you continue to upload and serve videos to your site’s visitors. In most cases, your website would be hosted with a bunch of other websites on the same server on a shared hosting package.

**4. File size & Storage Space**

If you upload large video files to a shared web hosting server frequently, you will eventually exceed the amount of storage that you have with your hosting plan. That would be the case, especially if you back up your site on a regular basis.

Additionally, to the amount of space backups will occupy, they will also start taking significantly longer to execute. In general, more data requires more disk space, which takes more time to backup and load. Also you will have to pay more to increase your storage

**5. Avoiding Inode Limits**

An inode is a data structure that is used to keep information about a file on a hosting account. The inode number is an indication of the number of files and folders you have, including everything on your hosting account (emails, files, folders, and everything else stored on the server).

Just like with bandwidth, hosting your video files directly on your web server could easily result in exceeding your inode limit. Unlike images or audio files, video files can be very large in size. An HD video could easily be as large as 200 MB or even more.

**6. Performance and Speed**

When your videos receive a large number of real-time views, it can have an adverse effect on your server’s performance. Having your website’s response time slowed down by your host is not optimal.

However, this is exactly what may happen as you continue to upload and serve videos to your site’s visitors. In most cases, your website would be hosted with a bunch of other websites on the same server on a shared hosting package.

Therefore, if you don't have a separate, dedicated server I recommend to use separate video storage to load from or embedded video like YouTube or Vimeo.

**7. Video Format and Compatibility**

When you upload to YouTube, Vimeo, or another video host, the site converts the video to a browser-friendly format. This way, the video can be viewed on virtually any browser and device. But when it comes to uploading videos to your own hosting, you're limited by format. Although YouTube and other providers use HTML5, the specification doesn't specify which video formats should be supported by browsers.

**8. Varying Quality Across Browsers**

Sadly, each app handles conversions with some slight differences. That often results in varying quality between all versions of your video. It may look great as an OGG file in Mozilla Firefox, but a bit lower in quality when viewed as an mp4 in Internet Explorer.

Additionally, different browsers handle playback in a different way, meaning the same video could work great in one browser but be buggy in another. You could spend hours experimenting with your videos and still not get a 100% match.

**9. Potential Piracy**

If you host your own videos, the file paths are often exposed in the source code, making them easy to be snatched. Anyone can simply copy the URL of the video’s location, download the file, and then upload it on the Internet, claiming it’s their own. It would be a much better choice to use embedding instead of self-hosting. That’s to protect your files and your website site.

**10. Loss of Visibility and Traffic**

YouTube is the most popular video hosting platform in the world. More importantly, they’re also one of the first places many folks turn when they’re searching for a topic. When you host your video on a third-party site like YouTube or Vimeo, you also benefit from their popularity, and people could find your video.

Note that platform like YouTube and Vimeo are one of the biggest websites with millions of daily traffics, and they'll always be available.

**Summary**

Now you have enough information, you know that there is no reason not to use a third party video host for your video content. The major benefit here is that you get a dedicated video URL and codes that you can then embed on your website.

The article can be found on [Techwebies](https://www.techwebies.com/2021/03/01/10-reasons-to-avoid-hosting-your-own-videos/)