Video is becoming a more and more popular thing for people and companies to put on their websites. However, video files are very large and can slow down page load time, thus hurting search engine rankings. The solution is to host the video at a video hosting service and then stream it on your website.
Popular Free Video Hosting Services-
YouTube is by far the most well known, and most used, video hosting service. You can simply upload your videos to YouTube and then take the URL, or the embed code and put the video on your web page.
If you have created a WordPress website, you’ll want to install a plugin to help you show YouTube videos. There are a lot of plugins to choose from that are free. For a regular HTML site, you’ll want to use the embed code that YouTube provides.
Using YouTube to host your videos also doubles as a good way to get people to your site. A lot of people will be searching on the site for videos on a certain subject and find your video. You can tell them to visit your website in the description, or perhaps in a text on the video itself. You’d be surprised at how effective this method is.
What If You Want To Keep The Videos Private?
What happens if you want to keep the videos restricted to a certain group of people? Let’s say you want to sell the videos as part of a training system.
A good solution would be to use a third party video hosting service that allows your video library to be accessed with a password. Then you could give paying customers the link to these videos, only after paying, along with their password.
Corporations who want a solution for training videos will often use a video hosting service.
Hosting Your Website That You Will Put the Videos On…
To be clear, if you are wondering, “Do I need a different type of web hosting plan for my website if I want to put videos on it?”
No. You will always need a basic web hosting plan, then you will tackle the issue of how to put videos on your web pages. Again, it’s a simple process if you don’t mind them being public, you don’t need another service! If you want them private, however, it will cost you extra each month with a video hosting service.
(If you are still confused, click to learn how to host a website using a cheap plan.)
Some Popular Paid and Free Video Hosting Services
Here is a list of some popular video hosting services over at Wikipedia. Some are paid, others have free and paid options.
Brightcove.
Cambridge Imaging Systems.
DaCast.
Dailymotion Cloud.
JW Player.
Kaltura.
Kewego.
MediaCore.
When choosing a video hosting service, hopefully it’s obvious now that it depends on if you need to keep the videos public or private. It is a simple process to host videos publicly and have streaming video on your site, but if you want to keep the video access confined to your own website, or password protect it, then you’ll need to use a paid service.
