Video Hosting – What’s That?

You’ve got your video… now where do you put it?

The internet is still a pretty mysterious place to many of us. While most of us can navigate through Google pretty well, don’t ask us to explain how any of it works!

Well, we certainly don’t know everything, but we can help you with one of the great mysteries of the internet – and that is, how do you get the great video that you just made onto your website?

You may remember in the old days when playing a video on a website was a painful experience. You’d see something interesting, press play, and the video would take forever to load. Or it would look really strange on your phone or computer. The player might be extremely small, or might not even fit fully on the screen.

There are dozens of combinations of operating systems, browsers and devices, and at the beginning, when people were trying to play videos from players that were built into their websites – well, let’s just say it was a very bad idea.

Fast forward to the modern era where most top-ranking websites include videos somewhere on the site. Typically the videos play without delay and will automatically recognize your device and optimize the display accordingly.

But how does this work? The best solution for most people is to take your completed video and upload it to a site like YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia or any other number of professional video hosting platforms. All of these companies have invested big bucks and many, many hours in developing software so their video players are fast and adaptable to different devices and browsers.

Once your video is uploaded, you can find the embed code (usually you’ll get this where you “share” the video), copy that and paste that right into the backend of your website. Your video is hosted on whichever site you choose, but a visitor to your site would never know that. To them the video looks like it’s right there on your site, a seamless part of the design.

There are other benefits to presenting your video content this way too. For example, YouTube is a popular platform to host on, both because it’s free to use, and because Google (which owns YouTube) gives you extra points in search engine rankings if you host your videos this way.

Hopefully this clears up some confusion around video hosting. If you have any more questions please reach out to us at and we’ll do our best to answer.