While online video has got a lot simpler recently with all browsers now supporting mp4 files and webp for video, it is still a complex space and not recommended self-host your videos. Today I wanted to attempt to cover the reasons why this is a bad idea in a none technical way.
For a kick-off video files are big, and I am only referring to 1080p video files here with a 10-minute video coming out around 1 GB from your average smartphone. If properly compressed, this can be reduced considerably, but the resulting file will still be big. When we start talking about 4K video files, these are huge.
Storing these files on your web server will take a lot of space, and space costs money. Storage is only half the picture, though. When user of your website play the video they need to download a copy of the file and bandwidth also costs money.
Here is an example to illustrate my reasoning here. In the above example of an uncompressed 10-minute video weighing in at 1 GB. If this video was to be watched 100 times, it would use 100 GB of bandwidth. Using Amazon AWS bandwidth charges as a baseline, this would cost you $22.
OK, so we have established it is expensive to self-host your video, but there is still more to this. Not everyone will have the internet connection speed available to stream a 1 GB file affectively without a lot of buffer. The solution to this is you need to have multiple versions of the video available at different rexsultuons and file sizes. Each of these requires storage and processing power to transcode.
Storage is something that can be bought and can be relatively cheap, with prices starting at $0.18 at Amazon AWS. It is the transcoding side of things that can be the hard part. If you are not a professional, getting your media transcoder settings right for the best qualify at the smallest file size for 4 different resolutions can be a minefield. Media encoders have countless options, buttons, and dials to contend with, each delivering different results.
Conclusion
So, we have established, video hosting is expensive and technically complex. There is a better way. For $10 per month Vimeo.com will give you unlimited bandwidth with an unbranded player and your video will not show on Vimeo.com only on the site you embed the video on.
This subscription technically lets you host as many videos as you want for the flat price, with no restrictions on the number of views and length of your videos. The only limit is you cannot upload more than 5 GB of videos per week to your account.
I have been using Vimeo for the last 5 years to host my clients videos and serve over 450 GB of bandwidth per month with over 70 hours of video watched every month. It does not take long to realise how much money you can save by hosted your videos on Vimeo.
