Hosting for Video
There are many reasons why you would want to host a video, be it for multimedia advertisements, pod-casting, hosting a fan-subbed video, or any other reason why you may need to host a video. Whether you simply want to host a video for your friends to download, stream a video to share with others, or simply remotely host a video for your website, there are many places which you can get this done. Which method you use to host your videos online and which provider to use really depends on what the purpose of your hosting videos online is.
For example, someone wanting to host a fan-subbed video or a video to share with the general public may want to use the various online streaming video hosts such as Veoh, Megavideo, Youtube and other similar providers. These websites allow you to host the video online and other people can stream the video from there. This gives you a larger audience because there is no need for people to make unnecessary downloads for them to see the video. It also has a large community that browses the websites regularly so you are sure to get the publicity that you need. The disadvantage of using such a medium would be the poor quality of the videos hosted. The videos hosted on these streaming websites would usually be of a poorer resolution and the size of the video is also smaller than normal videos.
Another option would be to host a video for your friends to download via providers such as RapidShare. While this method will not get you a lot of viewers for the video, and you need to tell people the URL of the video file for them to download the video, it allows you to preserve the original state of the video. The resolution and size of these videos tend to be better. A variant of using such a method to host videos would be to use Bit Torrent networks to host your videos. You can allow people to download your video via Bit Torrent and you do not need to host the video anywhere as it is hosted on the computers of the people who belong to that Bit Torrent network. This may be a good option especially if you want the large scale viewer-ship that Bit Torrent offers.
If you are simply hosting a video remotely for your website to link to or stream from, you may want to explore using web hosting to host your video. The web space that is usually allocated with each hosting plan will usually be sufficient for this purpose. However, if you are subscribing to a cheaper plan or if the space is insufficient, you may need to host it elsewhere. There are providers which allow you to host video files remotely such as FileAve and FlickCabin. These providers let you host your files on their directories and you can then hotlink to the videos from there. This not only saves you bandwidth but also lets you upload files simply and easily.
Once again, the choice for video hosting providers would ultimately depend on which purpose you are using it for. Picking a suitable provider to match your purpose is very important, otherwise you may have to make various adjustments later on which would be a huge waste of time and effort.
