Which is better host your own video or upload to youtube?

I have a local blog and I plan on uploading video of local events. I noticed that in wordpress there is a tab for hosting your own video and its $60 a year. Do you think is better to host your own video or upload to youtube and leave a link to your website?

Youtube is free, and it’s fairly easy to use, so if you have no specific reason not to use it, it should be fine.

Vimeo is another popular video host if you want to give that one a try as well.

Hosting yourself allows you to create/modify/customize your own video player, prevents ads from appearing, and bypasses youtube’s (much complained about) Content ID system used for identifying probable copyright infringement.

I would not pay $60 for wordpress.com hosting. You can get your own hosting space with a cpanel for significantly less. However–you also have to keep in mind how much traffic you’re expecting. A few hundred visitors won’t be a problem. Tens of thousands might be, and hosting on a video hosting service would probably be the better option since they have the infrastructure and bandwidth to support high numbers of visitors.

A third option would be to host the video yourself but via a CDN that allows for cheaper bandwidth. For example, if you post your videos to your Rackspace account and then link to them on your site, you can customize the player as Force Flow mentioned, while not paying too much for the download of the videos.

TBH, I cringe whenever I see that a video is hosted on Vimeo, because in most cases it means a stop-start experience for me at best, or a no play at worst. Not sure why Vimeo videos are so slow where I am, but they seem far less optimized than YouTube ones.

I’ve noticed that when a vimeo video is embedded in a page, it’s hit or miss as to whether or not it will play. So, most of the time, I end up clicking the logo, which brings you to the actual vimeo page where it’s hosted.

That’s interesting, although for me I get the same result either way. :frowning:

Agree! Vimeo’s player looks a bit nice but still, Youtube has a nice API and also (I will repeat this) a better compression.
Do not throw your money without reason.

Now that I think about it, I have ghostery and adblock plugins installed, so the glitch might be due to those blocking something the vimeo player needs, rather than an actual issue with the embedded player itself.

It’s very likely, I’ve had a number of perceived “glitches” until I looked into my AdBlock…It took me awhile to realize what was going on!

Youtube is better. If you host the video on you own, will it cost more bandwidth?

As Force Flow mentioned, and as a loyal user of Vimeo; I would recommend to make an account in Vimeo instead of Youtube. When you upload a video to youtube it will be easy to steal, download and copy, you won’t have any rights on it. So if you are making your own original videos, try a platform in which you can control who and how gets your video. Just my opinion

Videos on pretty much any hosting service can be copied. I wouldn’t consider this to be a reason to go with one service over another. If you’re concerned about people making copies, you might as well not release it at all since it will happen.

As so many third party options are available, overloading your server’s traffic with hosting your own videos would be a mistake. Just take the easy route and use Youtube,dont waste your money on something you dont need.

Agreed, unless you have a “pay to view videos” site there is no need to host them on your server.

Using youtube is the best way. If it is a private video intended for a closed group, you can upload a private video in youtube. Also you can use dropbox too