Website Development

Hosting

Feb 07, 2023

Amanda B.

14min Read

13 Best Video Hosting Services for Content Creation

Adding videos to a website is a great way to increase visitors’ average time on the page. It is also a crucial element of an effective digital marketing strategy.

However, video files tend to be large. Uploading them directly to your website can take up a lot of web hosting resources. This may slow down the site’s performance and negatively impact its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).

To avoid those issues, we recommend using a video platform that stores your content on a separate server. You can then add videos to your website using an embed code or link that the platform provides.

To help find a video host that caters to your needs, this article will discuss the benefits of using a video hosting platform and share the 13 best video hosting services along with their features.

Why Use a Video Hosting Service?

If you decide to host your own videos, you may encounter such problems as website server overload, playback errors, unexpected pauses, and compatibility or quality issues.

These issues can annoy visitors, leading them to leave your site before they finish watching the content. If the problem persists, your website may suffer from a reduced number of overall traffic.

The best solution is to use a video hosting platform. Here are some benefits of utilizing a video host for your content:

Easy to manage – these platforms integrate well with multiple applications, making it easy to publish videos to different channels simultaneously. In addition, users can easily edit or remove posted content.
Automatic backups – even if your site goes down, your videos are still saved and available on other platforms.
Accessible everywhere – this type of service can replicate your videos across data centers worldwide, making them accessible in different countries at once.
Time-saving – after uploading your content, video hosting platforms can automatically compress, encode, and adjust the resolutions according to visitors’ devices.
Content analytics – many video hosting solutions also provide insights into each video’s engagement rate. This may include the number of people who watch the content and the country where they reside.
Reduce bandwidth costs – if your hosting company charges you based on bandwidth usage, then a third-party video streaming provider can help you avoid those extra fees.

Top 13 Video Hosting Services

There are a lot of video hosting providers available. However, selecting the right one will depend on each person’s needs and budget since every platform offers different features and prices.

In this section, we will explore what each of these free and premium video hosting sites has to offer.

Platform Stats

Notable features: unlimited storage, a broad audience base, and a comments section
Best suited for: increasing brand awareness and reaching new audiences
Price: freemium (starts at $11.99/month)

YouTube is the best video hosting site with over two billion viewers worldwide. Aside from hosting videos, this platform lets you watch and subscribe to other users’ channels.

In addition, YouTube can help boost your brand’s visibility on search engines. There are also many practices that can help improve your content exposure on the platform.

Viewers can write comments under your YouTube videos, which helps to build engagement with audiences and potential customers. Moreover, many creators use this platform for Advertising Video on Demand (AVOD).

Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, this video hosting site can detect copyrighted music and images, and disable them if content creators use them without permission. This technology prevents users from accidentally committing copyright infringement.

Users can also earn money with the YouTube Partner Program. To join it, content creators must have at least 1,000 subscribers and live in a country where membership is eligible.

In terms of analytics, YouTube provides key metrics and video performance reports, such as watch time, views, reach, and engagement. This platform also features a line chart showing how the data has changed over time.

Aside from unlimited storage, users can also upload up to 15 videos at once. YouTube’s maximum video length is 12 hours or 256 GB of file size.

Overall, this platform is an excellent option for creators and business owners who want to reach a wider audience and monetize their content.

Cons

YouTube’s free version contains ads that may disturb the user experience
Branded players on embedded videos

Platform Stats

Notable features: high-quality player, customization options, privacy controls, and ad-free
Best suited for: displaying high-quality video content
Price: freemium (paid plans start at $12/month)

Vimeo is the best video hosting platform delivering high-definition (HD) videos across different devices.

It provides a 4K video playback option – all you need is the required bandwidth and screen resolution to view them. This is an excellent feature for creators to share high-quality videos, especially for broadcasting campaigns, commercials, films, or music videos.

Uploading videos to Vimeo is simple. Users can drag and drop a file from their desktop or connect their accounts to a cloud service, such as OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox. At the same time, this platform also enables video downloads.

Additionally, Vimeo users can edit and update a video after it has been uploaded without losing crucial analytics. You can also replace published content with new one in case there are mistakes or errors.

Another unique feature of this platform is that users are able to embed GIFs of videos in their emails to increase engagement.

One of the key benefits of Vimeo is its privacy controls. With this feature, users can make content visible only to selected team members and restrict unauthorized viewers’ access.

Aside from unlocking advanced features, the paid plans give you up to 2 TB of bandwidth per month, access to advanced analytics, live video streaming options, password protection, video editing tools, and player customization.

Cons

Vimeo’s Starter plan does not offer third-party player support
The free version only allows two video uploads per month

Platform Stats

Notable features: customizable player, ad integration and management, and video analytics
Best suited for: creating unique video players
Price: free

The next platform on our list is Dailymotion. It’s one of the largest free video hosting sites, with around 350 million monthly viewers.

Providing customizable players, Dailymotion gives users the freedom to modify the players’ appearance and functions, from adding a logo to changing the color of the progress bar.

Additionally, users with coding knowledge can customize the player via Dailymotion’s application programming interface (API).

The platform also offers ad integration and management, allowing content creators to earn revenue from uploaded videos. As one of the best free video hosting sites, it displays three main types of in-stream advertisements within its player – pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll.

Keep in mind that users must join Dailymotion’s partnership program to start earning income from videos and take advantage of all its extended features.

Another benefit of Dailymotion is that it provides a live-streaming option for users to connect with audiences in real time. From one event, you can create multiple broadcasts that run 24/7.

It also offers advanced tools such as Google Analytics integration and data exports to optimize content performance.

Ultimately, Dailymotion is great for content creators looking for a secondary distribution channel and business owners looking for a free platform to monetize their content.

Cons

The maximum content duration is two hours per file
A limit of 10 hours of video content per day

Platform Stats

Notable features: ads, sound-off options, video series, and playlists
Best suited for: creating a social media and video marketing strategy
Price: free

Facebook is a social media and messaging site that also works as a free video hosting platform. Around half of US social media users watch videos on this website every day.

Facebook Watch consists of two main sections – the Watch Feed and the Watchlist. The former is a personalized feed containing videos that match the viewer’s interests, while the latter includes videos from Pages the user follows.

Facebook Watch comes with an ad manager, which provides the demographic data and personal information needed to increase your content’s ability to attract potential viewers.

Since most of the platform’s users watch videos without sound, your content will also be muted by default. As a result, it’s important to use striking visual elements like product images and captions to communicate your message clearly.

This social video sharing site has many accepted video formats, but it recommends MP4. Although Facebook offers unlimited storage, it limits the maximum video length to 240 minutes or up to 10 GB of file size.

Due to its advanced targeting capabilities, this free service is an excellent option for business owners who want to reach their target audience by sharing videos on the largest social media platform.

Cons

Limited organic reach
Lower video quality compared to other platforms

Platform Stats

Notable features: content optimization, built-in recording feature, and unlimited video hosting
Best suited for: adding a CTA on a video and screen recording
Price: freemium (paid plans start at $19/month)

Vidyard offers many extended features aimed at businesses that want to use their content as a marketing tool. For instance, you can add calls-to-action (CTAs) to videos, encouraging viewers to take action directly after watching the content.

Vidyard also has built-in screen recording tools, which is a helpful feature if you are conducting remote onboarding, team meetings, and client presentations.

Furthermore, it provides ad-free videos with high-quality streaming. Vidyard also lets users add a custom thumbnail or animated GIF preview, making your content visually appealing.

When it comes to security, this video hosting site uses passwords and Single Sign-On (SSO) to protect your content. Additionally, you can manage user permissions and control access to folders on your platform.

Vidyard uses a drag-and-drop system to upload videos, making it very user-friendly and easy to use for beginners.

With Vidyard, you’ll get video editing tools, performance insights, unlimited link sharing, and up to 4K in video playback quality. Additionally, it enables users to set private videos using the access settings feature.

Overall, Vidyard is one of the top video hosting sites for businesses. It’s great for companies to make sales, internal communication, and marketing videos.

Cons

The free plan only allows users to embed up to five links

Platform Stats

Notable features: engagement analytics, player control options, and video heatmaps
Best suited for: tracking viewers’ activity
Price: starts at $7/month

Spotlightr enables you to host videos on its cloud servers, ensuring that content loads fast and plays smoothly on any device or browser.

This video hosting site lets its users see viewers’ activity via engagement graphs. This can be very useful for educators or coaches who want to track their students’ progress and see which parts of the video they skip, replay, or complete.

Spotlightr’s player also comes with control and manipulation options, such as disabling pauses, limiting plays, and showing or hiding the progress bar.

With this service, you’ll be able to upload videos easily using its drag-and-drop interface. In terms of file storage, Spotlightr offers between 50 GB to 600 GB of space depending on the subscription plan.

As one of the best private video hosting platforms, it offers several security features such as advanced HLS protection, domain restrictions, and the View Video Once option.

Spotlightr also allows you to monetize videos by displaying in-stream ads during pre-roll and post-roll. In addition, you can create a schedule and set videos to play at certain times or dates.

Due to its engagement analytics, Spotlightr is the best video hosting solution for teachers and educational website owners. It’s an excellent solution to track audiences’ interactions and progress with the published content.

Cons

The basic plan does not offer unlimited video uploads

Platform Stats

Notable features: A/B testing, unlimited users, and advanced analytics
Best suited for: promoting a brand and driving growth
Price: freemium (paid plans start at $19/month)

Wistia is one of the best video hosting sites for brand owners. It comes with all the necessary marketing tools to promote your business and generate growth.

Wistia offers an advanced analytics dashboard providing data such as engagement graphs, viewer-based tracking, and video heatmaps. These insights can help you make more informed video marketing decisions.

Another plus point of Wistia is its A/B testing feature, which enables users to compare two videos and gather their performance insights. In addition, it has a Turnstile form option that helps you collect leads directly from your video content.

Some other notable elements of Wistia include unlimited users, comments, permissions, and password protection. These features make it an excellent option for businesses or those who work in a team.

Using the premium plans, you can create a branded video player with a 4K quality option. Furthermore, it lets users add CTAs and annotation links to attract viewers and keep them engaged.

With Wistia, you can also record videos from its browser-based screen recorder, Soapbox, which comes as a separate product. Additionally, the platform enables you to edit content using the built-in Video Trimmer option.

Wistia is ultimately a great video hosting site suitable for marketing professionals and data-driven businesses who want to use videos to drive growth.

Cons

The free plan comes with very limited features, like no email integrations or video trimming options

Platform Stats

Notable features: live streaming, video libraries, and video marketing tools
Best suited for: monetizing videos with ads
Price: custom

Brightcove is one of the best video hosting sites for businesses that generate ad revenue from their content, like broadcasters, publishers, content creators, and mass media. It comes with many video hosting options, including live streaming and content marketing.

It is a video-centric content management system (CMS) with unique features like drag-and-drop playlists and batch editing. This helps users organize and manage their vast video libraries seamlessly.

With Brightcove, users can add a live streaming player directly to their website. You can also create clips during a video event and publish them straight to your social media channels.

This video hosting site also comes with advertising tools that have metadata-driven ad insertion and built-in integrations with major ad networks, enabling users to monetize their content easily.

One of Brightcove’s popular products, Video Cloud, offers high reliability with 99.9% uptime and robust security with access restrictions. What’s more, you can upload videos directly using a remote URL.

Brightcove offers three plan categories for different purposes such as marketing, enterprise, and monetization. Each option comes with a custom price depending on your needs, so you must contact the company to get a quote.

Cons

Not a beginner-friendly solution

Platform Stats

Notable features: robust security, video analytics, and custom video players
Best suited for: securing video content
Price: starts at $24.99/month

SproutVideo is a video hosting platform that makes it easy to customize and share videos online. It includes all the marketing, security, and analytical tools necessary to create successful video projects.

Offering robust security, SproutVideo comes with features such as SSO, password, and login protection. These tools let you secure your videos, authenticate viewers, and assign individual credentials.

This video hosting solution also allows users to restrict access to content based on specific IP addresses, URLs, and geographic locations. It also comes with advanced analytics and an easy embed feature.

Regarding its video player, SproutVideo supports ultra HD videos in 4K and 8K quality, making the content look sharp on your web page and any device. Users will also have the option to set their video playback speed and preferred resolution.

As one of the best video hosting sites, it comes with a 30-day free trial and four pricing plans, all of which get 500 GB of file storage and bandwidth. With the premium packages, you’ll be able to broadcast videos with your own branding.

If you are looking for a user-friendly online video hosting website with high security, SproutVideo is an overall excellent choice.

Cons

Additional charges if you exceed the plans’ resources

Platform Stats

Notable features: payment and monetization tools, picture-in-picture (PiP), and video SEO
Best suited for: starting a video business
Price: starts at $79/month

Uscreen is one of the best video hosting sites for selling videos online or launching a subscription service. It is an excellent option for educators, business owners, interest groups, or creators from various industries wanting to stream content and distribute video courses.

With its monetization features, you can offer one-time sales, rentals, and free trials for viewers. Moreover, Uscreen accepts payments in more than 130 currencies via popular providers like Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.net.

Uscreen also provides a PiP feature, which is a small and adjustable video player. Viewers can move it around their screens and keep watching the video while switching tabs.

This online video hosting website offers a 14-day free trial and three paid plans. With Uscreen, you’ll get an HTML5 video player and ES6 JavaScript. In addition, it provides over-the-top (OTT) applications for delivering videos via the internet.

Regarding file storage, the basic plan’s maximum video length is 50 hours with unlimited bandwidth. Furthermore, using its Geo-Blocking feature, premium users can restrict an audience’s access based on any physical location.

Cons

Selling subscriptions will require you to pay a fee per subscriber
Live streaming and live chat are only available with their custom plan

Platform Stats

Notable features: fast loading speed, real-time analytics, and unlimited video hosting
Best suited for: sharing video content with a customizable player
Price: starts at $29/month

Swarmify is one of the best video hosting websites offering a smooth video experience. It features a video content delivery network (CDN) for consistent streaming speed and quality, ensuring your visitors worldwide can enjoy HD videos without delay.

Swarmify’s player is free from links and branding, which is excellent for keeping visitors on your site. It’s also customizable, letting creators use their own logo and match its colors to their website.

With the SmartVideo feature, users can embed videos and adjust them automatically in the player. Accepted video formats include MP4, HLS, M3U8, WebM, VP8, VP9, AV1, and HEVC.

Furthermore, Swarmify automatically imports, converts, and optimizes all existing videos using the SmartVideo delivery system.

It has three pricing plans with a 14-day money-back guarantee. The most affordable option comes with unlimited file storage, background video acceleration, Google Drive integration, and up to 50,000 views.

This video hosting service also offers custom pricing for enterprises that need personalized video views, integrations, and 24/7 customer support.

For small and medium-sized business owners looking for a fast and unbranded video player, Swarmify is one of the best video hosting sites to try.

Cons

Additional charge for every 1,000 views above your Swarmify plan’s limit

Platform Stats

Notable features: ad-free video channels, automatic SEO, and multiple formats
Best suited for: adding a unique and ad-free video channel to a site
Price: starting at $25/month

Cincopa is one of the best video hosting websites that offer various services such as slideshows, image galleries, music catalogs, audio collections, and video players.

With it, users can create and embed ad-free videos on their websites. Moreover, this platform lets you tweak the channel’s design, such as changing the colors, customizing header images, or adding company messages.

One of the highlights of Cincopa is its video SEO tool, which optimizes your content for search engines. This helps bring more visibility and drive traffic to your site.

In addition, this ad-free video hosting solution uses an HTML5 player and delivers up to 4K quality across all devices. Some of the platform’s accepted video formats include AVI, MOV, and DivX.

It also provides plugins and integrations to many third-party applications such as Zoom, Slack, and WordPress.

Cincopa offers three plan options with a 30-day free trial. Each comes with live video streaming, SEO tools, video subtitles, and customer support. There is also a video management feature to upload, organize, and track your digital assets in one place.

Overall, Cincopa is excellent for businesses using videos to increase engagement and generate leads.

Cons

Cincopa plans’ maximum file sizes are small, ranging from 2 GB to 30 GB per file.

Platform Stats:

Notable features: ads revenue and diverse communities
Best suited for: streamers to share their skills and interests
Price: freemium (starts at $4.99/month)

Twitch is an interactive live streaming service that caters to specific niches such as online games, sports, music, and entertainment. Watching online videos on the platform is free via its application or the official website.

Twitch allows users to monetize their content via Bits and Subscriptions. The former refers to virtual goods or gifts that viewers can give to the streamer via the chat section. The latter involves streamers selling subscriptions that will enable their audience to receive notifications, comment on videos, and have customizable emotes.

To get more advanced features like extended broadcast storage, you can upgrade to the Twitch Turbo plan, which starts at $8.99/month.

This video publishing platform offers its subscribers ad-free viewing, sub badges, and sub-only chat or streams. Additionally, each content creator can offer extra perks as additional gifts. You’ll also get a Channel Analytics dashboard that displays a recap of your channel’s performance.

Furthermore, the video-sharing platform provides a Stream Summary dashboard that dives deeper into previously gathered data to highlight the accomplishments of past streams.

Overall, Twitch is an excellent option for creators who want to engage with their audience in real time.

Cons

Sometimes streams run into delays
The Twitch application is resource-heavy

Conclusion

Using a third-party video platform can prevent you from overloading the website server. Nowadays, many services enable users to manage and share videos easily. They usually also provide additional tools to enhance the viewing experience.

There are key features you must consider when choosing the best video hosting website. Check if it offers responsive video players, easy embedding options, video content management, SEO tools, customer support, and content analytics.

Let’s recap the 13 top video hosting sites:

YouTube – best for increasing brand awareness and reaching new audiences.
Vimeo – best value for money.
Dailymotion – best for personal use.
Facebook – best for reaching your target audience.
Vidyard – best for video optimization.
Spotlightr – best for tracking audiences’ activities and progress.
Wistia – best for small to medium businesses.
Brightcove – best for medium to large companies.
SproutVideo – best for securing video content.
Uscreen – best for launching a video subscription service.
Swarmify – best for fast-loading videos on any device.
Cincopa – best for adding a video channel to a site.
Twitch – best for live streaming.

We hope this article has helped you find the best video hosting service. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comments section below.

Frequently Asked Questions About Video Hosting

In this section, we will review some frequently asked questions about video hosting.

What Are the Benefits of Using Video on Your Website?

There are various advantages to adding videos to your site. Firstly, sites implementing video marketing are more likely to drive traffic and appear first in search results. It can also boost conversion rates by 80%.

Sites with video content also appeal more to mobile users. It’s been found that over 75% of video plays come from mobile devices. Additionally, videos enable you to deliver your marketing message faster, as it’s easier for audiences to digest information via visuals than text.

What to Look for in a Video Hosting Service?

There are some key factors to consider when choosing a video hosting platform. For example, check if it enables you to embed videos easily, has a responsive video player, supports many video formats, and is available in multiple resolutions.

Additionally, find a video hosting site that offers video SEO tools to help optimize your content to rank high on SERPs. It’s also ideal to find a service that provides video analytics and insights into viewer engagement.

Where Can You Host Videos for Streaming?

You can technically host your videos on a web server with your website files. However, doing this may overload your web hosting resources and cause the site performance to decline.

Therefore, we suggest using a third-party video hosting platform to deliver the best viewing experience for your visitors. Many solutions cater specifically to streaming, such as YouTube, Vimeo, Vidyard, Brightcove, Uscreen, Cincopa, and Twitch.

The author

Amanda B.

Amanda is a WordPress and digital marketing enthusiast with a passion for helping others grow their businesses and careers. She enjoys producing content that is both informative and helpful. When she’s not working, Amanda loves hiking, reading books, and filling her bullet journal.