There are a few different methods to display a video on your website and the advantages of using a third-party service like Youtube and Vimeo versus uploading and displaying video from your hosting provider.

Downsides of hosting video yourself

Uploading large video files to your website can not only take forever but they could be denied by the hosting provider due to upload size and timeout limits. If you have multiple people watching your video at once, it can slow or even crash your website due to exhausting those resources.

One video format, codec, size, and resolution does NOT fit all applications and devices. Streaming services re-encode your uploaded video to several different formats and resolutions and serve the right video to the user based on their viewing device and internet speed.

Video hosting services exist and thrive because they solve these problems. They also give you access to additional features such as analytics detailing how long your viewers watch your videos.

YouTube deserves special attention because it's the largest video hosting service in the world and the second-largest online search engine in the world. It’s also extremely easy to use and FREE!

There are some downsides to using providers like YouTube but most people are ok with them. Like…

Ads – YouTube generates revenue by advertising, whether they be pre-roll or banner ads at the bottom of videos.

Related Videos – Many embedded videos will show a thumbnail grid of related videos after your video has been completed. An algorithm chooses these videos based on context and relevancy, so a video might show up that you don’t want to.

Regardless of these downsides, with both free and paid options available, there isn't really a need to host your video on your web host.

How to embed a third-party service video

Within WordPress, adding a video has become as simple as pasting the video’s URL into a post or page. WordPress has built-in embed functions that take a known provider’s URL and convert it to an embedded video player, without you having to do anything else. For a full list of supported sites, visit the WordPress Embed Codex at https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/oembed_providers.

For a little more control, use a shortcode or editor block with additional settings that allow you to stylize the video and placement to your liking.

If you don’t use WordPress, then you can always choose the embed options found inside any of these third-party services. Be careful with this embed method because iframe codes will have explicit width and height values set in the parameters and these will not automatically adjust depending on the device a user could be watching from. To make the videos responsive to all devices, you must do a little more code work wrapping the iframe within a responsive DIV element and that might not be easy for those not familiar with HTML and CSS.

Conclusion:

We’ve talked about the downsides of uploading video to your website server in how those videos can take up lots of space and exhaust your server resources to slow or even crash your website. This is what makes a third-party video service the clear winner on how to display video for your website visitors.

I should also mention that the same can be said for large audio files as well. They also take up lots of resources to play. This is why we advocate that you use a streaming service for those as well like SoundCloud or a podcast provider.

In the end, keep in mind that the right solution exists to keep your website ripe with great content while never slowing your visitors down. We would love to help you with that. Reach out to us.