How to pick a video host

January 10, 2023

If you’re paying to host video on your business website or landing pages, on Patreon, or as part of your portfolio/reel, you have a lot of options for where to host your video and what plan or service to buy.

Most tools, including Streamable, offer subscription tiers with a combination of upload, storage, bandwidth, and features. It’s important to figure out what you need to ensure you’re not paying for services that you don’t use and to make sure you’re getting good value from your video host.

Lots of people end up paying huge premiums for things that they don’t use or need. Worse, some people get huge unexpected bills to maintain their video host because they didn’t anticipate their needs in advance. Use our handy guide for selecting a video host below

Figure out your needs

Step 1: Features

How are you planning to use your video? Figuring out what features you need from your host will help you figure out who and how you should evaluate a host.

The Basics include:

Most video hosts provide the ability to:

  • Upload video
  • Host at multiple resolutions (e.g. 360p, 720p, 1080p)
  • Set security/privacy settings for your video
  • Customize the video player
  • Embed a player

For many small businesses and professional video creators, these features meet most of their needs. If you’re shopping for standard hosting features, you have a wide range of options and should focus on finding a service that’s easy for you to use and gives you good pricing on your usage.

Specialized features include:

  • Lead Generation Forms within the player
  • Sales/CRM Integration
  • Paywalls for accessing content
  • Multi-seat enterprise account management
  • Single-sign on (SSO) for your organization
  • Micro-sites for publishing videos or playlists

Special requirements like these will narrow your video host choices, so you’ll want to start by shortlisting providers that have the special features you need.

Step 2: Storage and Bandwidth needs

One of the biggest factors in picking a video host should be what kind of usage needs you have. Storage and bandwidth will drive how much you pay month-to-month so it’s important to estimate what you need.

What do you mean by storage and bandwidth?
Storage allowances are essentially limits on the space taken to store your video in the cloud. As with your computer or phone, you only have so much local space to store your videos. Understanding your average video size and how frequently you post can be a good approach to figuring out how much storage you need.

Bandwidth is the measure of how much data is transferred to your viewers. For example, if you have a 10MB video that’s fully watched by 10 different people, the video host will transfer 10MB of data to 10 different video players (100MB of bandwidth). This can be a hard thing to estimate but understanding your audience size and the size of the video you're publishing will give you a starting estimate. Consider your future audience growth to ensure you’re estimating enough bandwidth when choosing a host.

Watch out for overage fees! It’s wise to look at how your costs will change if you go over your storage or bandwidth needs. It can be a pain to go viral or build a huge following and get surprised by huge quotes for video bandwidth.

Making a Choice

Step 3: Compare plans

Once you have a map of key features and your usage, you’ll be able to map out your options. Filter out the plans with the features you need, and map the cost per plan with the usage you need and the cost per plan if you were to have more usage than estimated.

Step 4: Value-for-money

Once you’ve compared the plans, it’s time to choose the best host for you. You don’t need to pick the cheapest plan, try out the hosts for how easy they are to use and consider other potential benefits with each plan. Pick the host that provides the best value to you.

Get started for free

Upload and share your first video with Streamable today.