Youtube Vs. Self-hosting Debate
There is an interesting debate going on at highrankings.com about whether it’s better to host your own video’s or use Youtube and embed the video into your page.
I have always recommended to my customers that they use YouTube or Google Video to host their videos and embed them into their pages. There are a couple of reasons for this. My customers tend to be smaller businesses and their hosting plans don’t include a huge amount of bandwidth or the ability to stream their content.
Most every business who post a video hopes that it get very popular and is a great promotion for their site, but if you get a good Digg, Stumble or some other sharing service recommending your video, you can quickly use up all of your bandwidth. Before you even know that it’s all gone your site may be down for quite a while and then you’ll probably have to buy more.
I don’t believe Google will ever run out of bandwidth.
The next issue is streaming. If you just post a video on your site the entire thing must be downloaded by your visitor before it will start to play. Many of them will leave your site before that if it’s a large video. To start playing the video as soon as the visitor arrives at your page requires a streaming server. Many web hosts don’t even offer that and true video streaming in any form can be expensive.
This is not an issue with most video hosting services.
There are also some some advantages to self-hosting. You can view the debate on
