You’ve invested plenty of time and energy in creating a video production to promote your business, communicate with staff or highlight features of your website. It’s now time to get your video out there and working for you. It’s vital that you host your video online in the most effective way. If your video won’t load properly, and you don’t really know if people are watching your content, then you risk your whole investment being a waste.
It’s the equivalent of having a new car parked in the garage but not being able to drive it because you can’t find the keys.
This is why it’s so important to make sure you have professional video hosting with the right support. Video hosting basically just means where on the internet your video is housed, and the way that it’s delivered to visitors to your website. A good video hosting service will give viewers the best possible user experience. People will be able to watch it quickly, on any device, and the picture quality will be high. Good hosting will also give you information that will help you improve your future content. It does this by giving you comprehensive viewer statistics that will tell you how successful your videos are with your audience.
What is hosting and what is embedding?
It’s important to know the difference between hosting and embedding. Hosting is the place where your video will physically be kept and embedding is pasting your video onto a website when it is being physically hosted on another website.
People sometimes think that the best way to host a video will be directly on their own website because that’s where people will come to watch it. The best advice I can give you is to avoid this.
The first problem with self-hosting is that your server probably won’t be able to cope with delivering video to people. This is because video files are very big, so when a few people are trying to watch your video it will load slowly and the rest of your website will load slowly too. If people need to wait for your website or video they won’t stick around so you’re losing your audience.
The next problem you may come across is the size limit for uploading and storing files. Many providers limit uploads to 50mb (a two minute video will usually come in at 200mb or above). The maximum storage limit for your website could also be a problem if you plan to add more content, these vary depending on your website host.
So Where Should I Host My Video?
Many people turn straight to YouTube or Vimeo for hosting. It’s easy and free and it solves a few of the problems I’ve talked about. The server bandwidth from these services is enough to support video hosting and there isn’t a size limit so you can upload all of your content. Finally, they’ll convert your video for different devices and web browsers once you’ve uploaded it so you don’t need to worry about compatibility. We wrote this post that will give you some tips to promote your business if you do decide to host on YouTube.
Free video hosting services solve many of the issues of self-hosting but if you want to get the most out of your video it might not be the way to go. That’s because these services will also be competing for your attention. The business model for free hosting services it to make money through advertising so it’s their goal to divert viewers back to their website and worst of all, put advertising on your video. Advertisements will cheapen your message and distract your audience and worse still, some of these advertisements could be for competitors in your field.
Professionals Deserve Professional Video Hosting
By far the best way that you can host a video is with a professional hosting service. This is because professional video hosting will not only give viewers a great user experience without advertising or distractions, but it also provides you with valuable information (analytics) that you can use to see how your videos are performing and what people are watching the most.
When you use a production company to create a video then quite often professional hosting won’t be part of the service. If this is the case then you’re not getting the value that you should be. A video without proper hosting runs the risk of being a wasted investment. If the user experience is slow or filled with advertisements then the message you’re trying to get across could easily go unheard.
At Dream Engine, we want to give our clients the best possible experience with video hosting so we offer a service that provides: analytics like heat maps that demonstrate the parts of a video that are the most engaging for viewers, the ability to capture email addresses or link people to another pages with a customisable ‘call to action’ and CRM plug-ins that allow you to track users at an individual level. This is all actively managed for our clients and it benefits them because it gives us information that informs future videos and helps to make a strategy. Then when it comes time to embed the video we just send a snippet of code that gets pasted into their website and its done. The video player supports mobile and desktop devices and gives people the best image possible for their internet connection.
So now you have a better idea of the advantages and limitations of different web hosting services so make sure the one you chose gives you the results your video deserves. If you want to create a video for your business that has optimised hosting and generates valuable information for your marketing strategy then get in contact here today.
Ryan Spanger is one of Melbourne’s most respected and sought-after video production professionals. Ryan founded Dream Engine in 2002, and specialises in helping medium to large corporates, government departments, and the non-profit sector to connect with their audience more effectively by using video.
