Should You Embed Videos or Upload Them to Your Own Server?
Embed a video or upload it straight to your website? Here are the logical reasons behind the answer, from server space and bandwidth to formats and resolution.
webdesign-jakarta.com - Once a website's design is finished, we usually need to fill it with quality content, and video is part of that. But web design has a classic dilemma: should you upload a video straight to your own server, or put it somewhere else, like YouTube or Vimeo, and embed it on the page? If you're still unsure whether to embed a video or upload it to your server, start by looking at your server's capacity. The average video is over 50MB, which takes up a lot of room on your own server.
If your server isn't very large, embedding from YouTube or Vimeo is the more attractive option. If the initial web design is good, an embedded video will look like a natural part of your website. Videos uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo and embedded well also tend to load much faster than videos on your own server, which add to its load. Here are a few logical reasons to weigh when choosing between embedding a video or uploading it directly to your website's server:
Server Storage Capacity
If you rent a server or hosting plan, think long and hard before uploading videos, which average more than 100MB in HD. Once uploaded, they eat up free space that should be going to the other files your website needs.
Bandwidth
Every time a visitor opens your site, loading the landing page uses bandwidth. Images, text and most other content won't put much load on the server, but if your host caps your monthly bandwidth, playing videos will use up a lot of it.
Video Format
Not every browser and server supports every format for buffering video. If a visitor plays a video in a format their setup doesn't support, it won't play or will just show a blank screen.
Video Dimensions and Resolution
Sometimes visitors don't want to watch at a very high resolution. If you upload the video straight to your own server, the server has no way to scale it down to other resolutions, and visitors may leave.
The right solution is to embed videos from a dedicated video hosting service such as youtube.com. The embed connects to your website and looks exactly the way it does on YouTube, and you can resize the player to fit your site's template.
