Submitted by Taran Rampersad on Fri, 08/26/2011 - 12:24
On more than one occasion I've heard clients and potential clients say that they want to host their own videos on their own site. On these same occasions I've asked, "Why?"
Not only do you pay for the storage on your web server - one way or another - you also pay for the bandwidth used (yes, even with the cloud). Meanwhile, if you use YouTube or Vimeo to host the same videos you... don't. Not directly, anyway. And both allow you to embed videos into your own site - something which I'm not doing now with the animation of Fred Ott's Sneeze (Edison Kinetoscopic Record for a Sneeze by William K.L. Dickson in 1894). Consider that this sneeze video has been around for 117 years in its various incarnations.
The other benefit that people don't see is that if people come across your video on either of these sites, independently, they can create traffic to your site - for your message to get across, whatever it might be