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How to host videos on my website?

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Usually this is a bad idea.

Videos are very large. This means two things for your hosting:

they use up a lot of storage space

they use up a lot of bandwidth

Bandwidth for video becomes a big problem if you end up having a lot of visitors to your site — it can really slow down performance and create a bad user experience. On top of that, you’ll run over your bandwidth limits a lot faster than with a mostly-text site.

On top of the bandwidth problem, there is also the problem of responsive video serving. Generally, it is a good idea to serve lower-quality videos to users on slower connections, or on smaller screens with lower resolution.

If you self-host your videos, you will have to:

generate several different versions of each video

use media-queries to determine which video to show, and automatically send the correct one to the user

This can get complicated very quickly.

In most cases, it is better to host your videos with YouTube or Vimeo. This will offload the bandwidth usage, and both services automatically handle responsive video playback.

An additional benefit of hosting your videos on YouTube or Vimeo is that this provides another pathway into your content — users may find your videos while browsing those sites (assuming your videos are public), and you can link from your videos to your site.

With either video site, you can embed videos onto your own website pages with simple embed codes.

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