One thing we can all agree upon when it comes to website promotion or marketing is that nothing beats a professionally designed video. If you are a small business, you would do well to invest in media creators that can design attractive and eye-catching videos for you to share with the world.

If, as the saying goes, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, a video can translate into a whole lot more. Therefore, as long as you can afford creating them, the more of them you have, the better it will be.

But then, you eventually will have to come across the issue of where you are going to host your videos. After all, they were created for public consumption and you need to put them in a place where they can easily be accessed by your site’s visitors.

The best solution is to upload them to third-party video sharing services (YouTube and Vimeo are great examples) and then either link to them or embed them on your website.

Now that we have that out of the way, we will see why it isn’t a good idea to simply create a directory on the server your website is hosted on and dump all your videos into it:

1. Video files are relatively huge compared to the other files you need for your website. This means they will eat up your allocated disk space and you will have to either upgrade your account to accommodate the videos or you will have to find another place for them.
2. The same logic applies to bandwidth. Whenever people stream your videos, they will be consuming far more bandwidth than if they were simply accessing your website. Once you have reached your allocated bandwidth, your visitors won’t be able to see your video – and you’ll be stuck until the next bandwidth cycle starts.
3. When you think of it, why would you want to use up bandwidth and disk space you are paying money for when you can simply dump them on video sharing sites that charge you nothing? Most of the popular video hosting and sharing sites allow you free use of their server space and bandwidth (in some cases you can actually earn money from advertisement), so why not take advantage of them?
4. When you host a video on your web hosting provider’s server you are literally asking all your visitors to access and download one single video at the same time. Your visitors will experience unexpected pauses while watching it because their devices will wait for the file to download or stream. Now, you might not think it too bad an issue, but imagine you were watching a viral video on YouTube and you had to access it along with the thousands of people that are looking to do the same thing at the same exact moment. The frustrations alone wouldn’t have allowed for companies like YouTube to be the successes they are today, now would they?
5. Unfortunately for you, there is no single video file format that has been set as a standard. This means all the browsers out there support one type of video format and not the other. If your visitors use Internet Explorer or Safari, they will only be able to play MP4 videos, for example. Firefox users will only be able to watch Ogg or WebM videos and not MP4 ones. The only exception to this rule is probably Google’s Chrome which can play all the major video formats. But you can’t ask all your visitors to use just one browser – it’s impractical. The only choice you have is uploading at least three versions of each and every video you have, and this again takes us back to the disk space and bandwidth issues we’ve seen earlier. Not to mention the time you have to spend converting files in the first place.
6. Similar to the problem mentioned above is one regarding the video quality itself. It can safely be assumed that for the most part, people will be watching your videos from their computers (laptops and desktops) and have access to high-speed internet connections. This means they will require higher-quality videos and that, in turn, means HD-quality files. You will have to create 720p and 1080p video files with a higher streaming bitrate of 5000 to 8000 kbps. But what about the rest of the world – they will be watching the videos from their mobile phones or will have slower internet connections. You will have to create videos of lesser qualities for them too. Now, multiply all this work with the number of videos you have. Does it really seem feasible?
7. Let’s just assume you do want to put in the work and do all that converting. The next step becomes serving the right video to the right browser and at the right quality. True, you could add software or plug-ins to do the serving for you, but you will still have to get some coding done to handle the “if” conditions – which makes the job just too complicated, especially if you’re not adept at writing codes. All this work still doesn’t guarantee your video will look good or play well across all browsers.

And so, the simple solution is to let the people who are good at hosting and serving videos do all the work for you and then simply embed the links on your site.

Problem solved!