Where Should You Host Your Blog’s Videos?

I have talked many times about how it can be a great idea for you to produce your own videos. It is really easy to do. However, once you have a nice, shiny video, how do you go about actually putting it on your blog?

Let’s look at your options.

Essentially, you have three viable options here:

1. Host your video on one of the many video sites (i.e. Youtube) and simply embed into your blog.
2. Host your video on your own server and embed onto your blog locally.
3. Host your video elsewhere, but a place where you have total control.

Third-Party Video Sites

Using sites like Youtube or Vimeo to host your online videos is the most popular way to go. It is easy to do plus it saves you the headache of the potential bandwidth demands of online video.

The drawback, however, is that video quality can be diminished. For example, if you upload a video to Youtube, very often you’re going to see the video quality drop significantly and that’s because they are trying to save space and bandwidth. When you upload a video to any of these sites, typically THEY do the encoding for you. It is convenient, but they pick the settings and your video can come out looking a little bit grainy.

That said, I generally recommend going this route for most bloggers simply because it is free and easy. If you don’t mind the quality loss, Youtube is a great option because that also means you expose your video to the substantial audience who surfs Youtube directly. If you choose to go with another site like Blip or Vimeo, I still suggest you also upload to Youtube.

Use a site like TubeMogul to upload to multiple video sites simultaneously.

Hosting Locally

So, what about encoding the video yourself and uploading it to your own server? You can do that, however it is a lot more work. You will have to do the encoding to Flash format on your own. Usually the quality will come out a lot better this way, though.

Bear in mind, though, that hosting large media files off your own server can be a significant load on your site. Chances are it is going to noticeably slow down your blog. This is why I don’t really recommend this. A much better alternative is…

Remote Video Hosting

You can pay for hosting which is separate from your web hosting, and the only purpose of this account is to host your large media files. One of the most popular ways to go here is Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is “cloud hosting” for file storage. Essentially, you are using the same server clusters as Amazon uses for their own site. The great thing is that it scales to your demands and you only pay for what you need. Storage and bandwidth is incredibly cheap as well.

Amazon S3 isn’t the most straight-forward thing in the world to use. You can’t tap into it with your typical FTP program. Instead, you need a secret key and an access key, both which you will get when you sign up. Then, you can use a Firefox plug-in called S3Fox to interface with your account. Alternatively, you can use a service like EZS3 (who I just signed up with).

Embedding Your Videos

If you use one of the third-party sites out there, you will be using their video player. They provide the embed codes and you just paste that into your WordPress post and you’re good to go.

If you go the more do-it-yourself route, you need to find another way. WordPress now has an FLV player built right into it. When doing your post, just hit the button for uploading a movie file. Alternatively, you could go with a plug-in like FLV Embed or Viper’s Video Quicktags. That Viper plug-in is particularly good and has a lot of configuration options.

You can use these embed options for videos hosted on Amazon S3 as well. If you go with a service like EZS3, however, you can use their players and you will even get video view stats (something you won’t have otherwise). You can also use something powerful, like Easy Video Player. EVP is awesome and does a LOT of cool stuff with your videos.

So, What Does Dave Recommend?

For quick videos where you just want maximum viewership and you don’t care to keep the video exclusive to your own site, I recommend Youtube or Vimeo. I see many sites use Blip and they’re good, too.

If quality is very important to you, or you want to keep the video exclusive to your own site, I recommend Amazon S3. Just keep in mind that you’ll need your own FLV encoder if you want to encode to Flash.