Website Hosted Videos | Everything Publishers Must Know

Self-hosting means that you upload the video file to your site, using the built-in file uploader in WordPress, the same way you might upload a photo or image to your site. Now, the moment of truth, below are some explanations to your upload limiting factor unless you want to be the next YouTube or Facebook with your own self-hosted servers.

Piracy Related to a Website Hosted Videos

If you’re running a membership site with protected video content (like this site), you’ll want to ensure your video files can’t be downloaded by some nefarious individual and then redistributed illegally on file-sharing sites. I discovered this vulnerability the hard way, and spent the better part of a year sending DMCA takedown notices to file sharing sites, over and over again.

Because the video paths are easily exposed in the source code, anyone can simply copy the URLs, then download the videos to their own computer and redistribute at will. I found a script that obfuscated the video paths, but it wasn’t updated often, and eventually stopped working with my video players.

NB: (BTW, one of the many reasons we use and recommend Vimeo PRO is that you can hide your videos from their public directory, and also specify a particular domain on which the video may be embedded. This ensures your videos can only be embedded on your own site.)

Host Service Server Bandwith

Video files can be quite large in size. Unlike images—which are typically measured in kilobytes (KB) —an HD video file can easily weigh in at more than 100 MB.

Now, imagine what will happen to your shared hosting server when dozens of folks attempt to watch the same video at the same time. Imagining your traffic is that notoriously large.

Your web hosting provider allocates a certain amount of bandwidth and other resources for each server on their network, based on average traffic rates that do not include serving large media files to hundreds of individuals (or more) at the same time.

Too many requests for a single large file will quickly exceed the limits of the web server on which your site is hosted, and bring your site—and any other sites that also “live” on the same server—to its knees.

Site Size Capacity and Storage Space

Most web hosting providers limit the maximum size of uploaded files to 50 MB or less. This prohibits you from uploading video files that are longer than a few minutes or so in duration.

Additionally, large media files may violate the terms of the Acceptable Use Policy with your hosting provider. Resulting in your hosting account being shut down. Also, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is very substantial on the limits of filing online. Also, has very direct rules to the server hosts.

If you’re able to upload large video files to your server on a frequent basis. Eventually, exceed the amount of storage space provided by your hosting account, especially if you regularly back up your site. In addition to the amount of disk space your video files will occupy, backups will begin to take significantly longer to execute.

More data requires more disk space and takes more time to backup. That is if you still understand your lessons on disk space usage and file sharing speed. As well as back up on files on a given memory.

Theme type in Relation to a Website Hosted Videos

Some Themes and Plugins are still under developers or developments plan and using them would be very unstable or unresultant. Unless you are on a Pro or Premium Package, you may not receive the substantial support in case the whole theme becomes unstable.

Remember, the fact that you design on WordPress and are good at developing readily customizable themes.

If you’re running a membership site with protected video content (like this site), you’ll want to ensure your video files can’t be downloaded by some nefarious individual and then redistributed illegally on file-sharing sites.

This doesn’t mean that these themes were made by Bill Gates or Zuckerberg. Hence, they are developing each day in millions by geeks like you and I. That means that they may be prone to many large and instantaneous failure on your backend.

Leading to failure in files and development progress in CSS Editorial. There the next time you choose a Theme for your site or client’s, better be careful about which once you chose from first.

Lazy Loading in the Website Hosted Videos

If your video file resides on a single server with a limited amount of bandwidth. The folks who attempt to watch your video may experience unexpected pauses during playback.

This is while their computer waits for the file to download or stream to their computer. This problem is compounded by a slow Internet connection. Even when I hosted my videos on Amazon’s S3 content distribution network (CDN), many people still complained about slow-loading videos.

You need a Backup Server faster enough to hold its own capacity. This feels yours like a drop of water or even a dust particle in the desert.

File Format Standard for Website Hosted Videos

The current HTML5 draft specification does not specify which video formats browsers should support. As a result, the major web browsers have diverged, each one supporting a different format. Internet Explorer and Safari will play H.264 (MP4) videos, but not WebM or Ogg.

Firefox will play Ogg or WebM videos, but not H.264. Thankfully, Chrome will play all the major video formats. However, if you want to ensure your video will playback on all the major web browsers. Convert your video into multiple formats: .mp4, .ogv, and .webm

Now you’ve got three different video files to upload, each one potentially hundreds of megabytes in size.

NB: (By the way, just how much bandwidth does your Internet provider allow you to use before imposing bandwidth caps? You may soon find out after you’ve uploaded several gigabytes of video files.)

Website Hosted Videos Shortcodes

Whether you use a third-party plugin or WordPress’ built-in video capabilities. You’ll need to create a bit of code to tell the video player which formats you’ve created. As well as their location on the server. It looks something like this…

<video poster="movie.jpg" controls> <source src="movie.webm" type='video/webm; codecs="vp8.0, vorbis"'/> <source src="movie.ogg" type='video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis"'/> <source src="movie.mp4" type='video/mp4; codecs="avc1.4D401E, mp4a.40.2"'/> <p>This is fallback content</p> </video>

Even with the built-in support for video in WordPress, you’ll still need to construct a shortcode like this…

video width=”960″ height=”540″ mp4=” movie.mp4″ ogv=” movie. ogv” webm=” movie. webm”

So after correctly assembling your shortcode, upload all the video files to your server. And installing a video player to handle all the “behind the scenes” detection.

Then, why does your video look so much better in some browsers/devices than others?

Browser Qualities for a Website Hosted Videos

Remember earlier, when I said you’ll need to convert your videos into nearly half a dozen different formats and sizes? You’ll need a software app to handle this file conversion for you. There are hundreds of video conversion applications out there. However, you need more than one to handle conversion into all the various formats.

Unfortunately, every app handles the conversion process in a slightly different way. Thereby, resulting in varying quality in your video files. Your video may look great as an MP4. But by viewing the OGG file in Firefox, your video looks grainy or bitmapped.

Further complicating this issue, each web browser also handles playback differently. This means the exact same video file will look great in one browser, but horrible in another. I spent countless hours experimenting with the settings in my conversion software, thou I never got this dialed in 100%.

How are Videos useful?

It’s not too hard to see why video is so popular these days — for one thing, it’s an easy-to-digest format that gives our eyes a rest from the overabundance of textual information online. This would be why the world reportedly watches 1 billion hours of YouTube social video per day.

And those of you who are headed towards digital marketing careers should have a complete understanding of the power of video as a marketing tool. This is not only because they might be interested in making amazing videos, but because they’ll probably have to learn to incorporate video into their content in order to remain competitive.

Video is a versatile and engaging content format that not only gives us a real-life picture of what is going on; it’s also easy to share across multiple platforms. Consumers like it because it’s easy to digest, entertaining and engaging, and marketers like it because it can give a potentially huge return on investment (ROI) through many channels.

Video is also very accessible to anyone with internet access, both to watch and to produce. While there is certainly a trend towards higher quality video on a professional level, anyone can hop onto their laptop and create their own video in under an hour.

To develop your Video Marketing strategy, you’ll want to:

1. Allocate resources. You’re going to need to designate some budget for video – at the least, decent equipment, good editing software, and a video marketing guru (or, better, team) – as well as time to create it.
2. Tell your stories. Storytelling has never been as important as it is in the video, so get brainstorming: What stories do you want to tell? How will you tell them?
3. Engage. It’s not enough to simply tell your stories; you must engage your audience while you do so. How will you make your stories interesting? What will hook your audience?
4. Keep it short. There’s no set length for marketing videos (although there are recommendations), but the general rule is that shorter is better. Be ruthless with your editing. Cut, cut, cut out everything extraneous. Attention spans are short, so make the best of what you get.
5. Publish. Publish your videos far and wide – embedded in your website, uploaded to Google-owned YouTube, and on all your social media channels. Then, promote, promote, promote.
6. Analyze. Track metrics and stats, to determine which videos do the best – and why.

Why is Video Marketing important?

Video marketing is all over the Internet. Look no further than your favorite brands, your Facebook, your YouTube homepage, and there it is: successful video marketing that has found its way to your eyes. If a photo’s worth a thousand words, then how much more valuable is a video? That’s the basis of video marketing.

A forward-facing marketing strategy that integrates engaging video into your marketing campaigns. On the surface, the how of video marketing is pretty simple: Your brand creates videos that, in some way or another, promote your company, drive sales, raise awareness of your products or services, or engage your customers.

In practice, it’s a little more complicated. Like many of your marketing efforts, video marketing is data-driven, so you’ll want to monitor various metrics and track customer engagement. As a medium, it takes more time to produce a video than any other kind of online marketing. Therefore, to ensure you get the best value, a video marketing strategy is required.

Here is more: What are the Benefits of Video Marketing?

Well, before you break these few rules and start uploading the videos on your site. Understand why you need to find another host for your website hosted videos.

Also, consider why you are having videos, for marketing, advertising, monetizing or just awareness.

In addition, understand the terms and conditions of both your host and other shared host servers like VIMEO and YOUTUBE. Thus get to know and understand the two-way benefits you get by having a second party having your content.

Resources;

Having said that, I hope the above-revised guide was informative enough especially to beginners in video marketing.

But, if you’ll have more questions or even contributions, please feel free to Contact Us. We’ll be more than glad to offer our input and limitless service solutions support. By the same token, you can share your thoughts with other readers in the comments box below this article.

Finally, below are more useful links related to the topic above.

1. What is Search Engine Marketing?
2. Digital Marketing and Advertising Guides
3. Search Engine Optimization » Beginners Guide
4. Website Ranking on Page One Guides
5. What is Marketing Leads conversion?