Hosting your video
Where you host your video is every bit as important as what’s in it. That might seem like quite a bold statement, but getting the hosting right can make the difference between people watching your video on a page on your site, or your entire site shutting down. It’s that serious! There’s also a super-secret SEO trick to do with video, and we’ll take a look at this here as well.
What IS hosting?
Firstly, what do we mean by “hosting”? Well, just as you have to have a physical place to store the code for every page of your website (i.e. a server), so you have to have a physical place to store your video. Regardless of where that physical place is, your video will still appear on a page on your website. It’s just that the video itself might be stored in a different physical place to the rest of site.
Regardless of where your video is stored, the way people view it on
your site will always be the same. A small piece of html code causes
the video to appear on the page of your choice, where it will either
start automatically, or wait until the viewer clicks “play” (see this
page for an example of the code you need to make a video appear). Either
way, the video itself is being retrieved bit by bit from the server.
This is called streaming. The three main factors that govern
how fast a video streams into a viewer’s web browser are: a) how fast
the streaming server is, b) how fast the viewer’s internet (i.e. broadband)
connection is, and c) how busy the internet is at that particular moment.
One factor that can govern where your video is hosted (and which is probably the most important single consideration) is the actual size of the video. Typically, a 3-minute high quality video from Pearldrop is about 30mb. That means that every time someone watches your video, it’s going to cost you 30mb of bandwidth. If you only have a low monthly bandwidth allowance (say if you’ve got free web hosting, or are just paying for a basic package), you might run out of bandwidth really quickly.
The Hosting Options
There are essentially three options for video hosting, each with their own benefits and problems. Those options are: a) your own server (which you pay for as part of your normal web hosting package, and which gives you a place to store all of your site’s code files); b) a video-sharing website like YouTube, or c) a Cloud Computing service like Amazon Simple Storage (don’t panic, we’ll explain this in a minute).
a) Hosting video on your own server
This is a great option if you have a fast, high-bandwidth server. You might have a server like this if you’re a medium-sized company or a big corporate. It means that the video will stream very quickly into the viewer’s browser (so there’s no annoying buffering, or stop-start playback). It also means that you’ve probably got enough of a bandwidth allowance to make sure that, no matter how many people watch the video, you never run out of bandwidth.
If, however, you’ve only got a basic web hosting package (for example if you’re a small company, hosting only a very few pages), you may have a slow server with limited monthly bandwidth. Let’s say that you’ve got a package that allows for 1gb of bandwidth per month. That’s fine if all you’re hosting are a few basic pages of text and images: your site can be seen by hundreds of people every month, without any problems at all. But the chances are that if you stored your video on that server, it would stream very slowly (because it’s not set up for video streaming), and, crucially, that you’d run out of bandwidth really quickly. Here’s the maths:
1gb = 1,024mb.
One 3-min Pearldrop video = 30mb.
1024/30 = 34 (approx).
So 34 people could watch your video per month (without looking at
any other page of your site), before you reach your monthly bandwidth
limit. Why should you care? Because if you exceed your limit, either
your entire site will shut down for the month, meaning no one can view
any of your pages, or you’ll get a MASSIVE bill from your hosting company
for every mb of bandwidth you use over your monthly allowance. Not exactly
preferable!
YouTube is great because it’s free and (usually) reasonably fast. The idea is that you make yourself a free YouTube account, upload your video to it, and then use the code that YouTube gives you to embed the video into your own site. You never pay for any bandwidth costs (even when you embed the video into your own site), because YouTube is taking the load. It’s also a great way of promoting your video, and possibly getting it a high Google ranking (see here for more about this). The disadvantages of YouTube are that a) it’s not very controllable, b) it can sometimes be really slow to stream the video, c) you have to use the branded Google player on your site, and you’ll be stuck with the YouTube logo on the bottom right of the video when it’s not playing, and d) you have very limited control over the thumbnail image that appears before the video is played. See an example here.
c) Hosting video in the Cloud (for example on Amazon Simple Storage)
This is essentially the magic bullet of web video hosting. We’ll focus here specifically on Amazon Simple Storage. Amazon (Earth’s good old biggest bookstore) recently branched out into data storage, and, just like their online bookstore redefined the market, and is still pretty much the best resource of its kind in the world, so their hosting packages are pretty much unbeatable. In fact, it’s such a good option that many of the US TV networks use it to stream video content like online versions of their most recent episodes.
Firstly, their servers are super-quick. (I think they’re actually about three times faster for streaming video than a standard web server). They achieve this by having amazing infrastructure with dedicated servers, and also by maintaining a network of servers all around the world. When you upload your video to Amazon, it doesn’t just sit on one server. It’ll be mirrored to servers all over the world, and when a viewer wants to stream that video from your site, Amazon works out which is the closest server to the viewer, and causes the video to stream from it. The closer the server is to the viewer, the faster the video will stream. Simple!
Secondly, you’ll never run out of bandwidth. Amazon Simple Storage is a paid-for service, which means you only ever pay for the bandwidth you use. But what makes Amazon so great is that it’s also cheap. Here’re the costs:
$0.15 per month per gigabyte of bandwidth, with the first gb free. So:
For a Pearldrop micromentary lasting 1min30secs and approx 10mb large:
1024/10 = 102.4, so the first 102 views are free, then it’s $0.15 per 100 views thereafter.
For a Pearldrop minimentary lasting 3mins and approx. 30mb large:
1024/30 = 34.13, so the first 34 views are free, then it’s $0.15 per 34 views thereafter.
All you need to use Amazon Simple Storage is an account with Amazon with a credit card linked to it (i.e. the same account you’d use to buy books). They then simply bill your account every month for the amount of bandwidth you use. Pearldrop can administer the account for you, so that we can upload your videos without your input, and can then simply give you the code you need to get the video live on your site.
See an example of a video streaming from Amazon.
Whichever hosting option you choose, Pearldrop can help set everything up for you, and will generate the code you need to get your video playing on your site in no time at all!
