Last Updated on November 30, 2022 by hassan abbas
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Just when you think self-hosting video is a great step for your site growth, that’s when you actually head straight to greater issues. Even uploading videos as short as presentation videos directly from your host server is not the best act you can do.
Self-hosting videos refer to an action where you upload your video directly from your hosting server. In other words, you don’t use a video-based platform like YouTube and Vimeo as a third-party to upload your video. Meanwhile, including third-party is more recommended to include videos on your site.
Moreover, self-hosting videos can screw up your marketing strategy because your site fails to provide the good user experience. Let’s keep on reading to know the five reasons why you should not consider self-hosting video
1. Bad video quality
Self-hosting video has a higher possibility of making your video perform poorly on your site. It may cause such problems as a slow loading process, bad quality videos, and in the worst case, your video won’t load at all. These problems will give a bad experience to your visitors.
There are several reasons underlying such problems. The main reason is that videos are commonly big, especially HD videos. While most web hosting providers have limitations for uploading media. Commonly, they limit uploading files to 50 MB or less.
On the other hand, a one-minute video with the minimum HD resolution (1280 x 720) will result in a 105 MB video. So, in order to make your video fit into your website, you need to reduce the resolution or shorten the video length.
But, when you eventually make your video fit into the website, isn’t it the least that you can do to your video?
2. Potential of getting suspended
Your site potentially gets suspended due to too many requests from your server. This deals with bandwidth utilization in your hosting account. Bandwidth is the amount of data transmitted to or from your hosting account in a certain amount of time (per month).
For example, if visitors access or download a 50 MB video from your website, it means they use such an amount of bandwidth from your account. When more visitors are accessing the same video, it can exceed the bandwidth limits and affect other websites within the same server.
Meanwhile, most web hosting providers don’t tolerate one site affecting other sites, so they may temporarily suspend your site until you fix the problem.
3. More work to convert videos for different browsers
While video-based sites like YouTube and Vimeo instantly convert videos into a browser-friendly format, it doesn’t work the same for browsers. Major browsers like Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Edge, and Safari use different video formats.
There are three common video formats for browsers, which are MP4, OGV, and WEBM. In order to make your videos playable in all browsers, you have to convert them into those three formats before uploading. Thus, you need to upload multiple videos to meet the requirements of all browsers.
4. Unexpected long pauses while streaming
Experiencing long pauses while watching a video is perhaps one of the worst things to happen. It will result in disappointment from your viewers and make them leave your site to come to other resources for better experiences.
If you host your video on a single server which usually has limited bandwidth, your video is likely to perform poorly. As mentioned previously, the more visitors accessing the same source, the more your bandwidth is used.
Therefore, it takes a longer time for video to load and it can cause videos to lag and freeze which can affect your visitors’ experience. Your video may perform even more poorly if your viewers have a slow internet connection.
5. Potential video piracy
Another concern if you self-host your video is potential piracy. This is because people can access the file paths of your video in the source code. Therefore, anyone can download the file by copying the video’s URL location and uploading it somewhere else claiming the video is theirs.
Even though there is a solution to this problem by setting up a membership site. However, there is still potential piracy that makes your video end up on YouTube.
Solution and Conclusion
The five points mentioned above should be enough to make you concerned about self-hosting your video. Not only it isn’t capable of uploading high-quality and long videos, but self-hosting videos also require you to work more.
Besides, it’s risky for any potential piracy of your video. Therefore, to give your viewers the best experience on your site, you may take another route as a solution. It’s better to upload your video on YouTube and embed the link to your website. This way all problems above can be avoided.
Author
Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, the award-winning explainer video services. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).
Twitter: @breadnbeyond
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: Andre Oentoro
