The Best Streaming Hosting of 2023 – Digital.com

Best Streaming Hosting

A2 Hosting earns the spot as the top streaming hosting provider because it offers several high-quality hosting options for your streaming service. In contrast, its VPS hosting starts at $4.99 per month, and its dedicated hosting starts at $105.99 per month.

Compare Streaming Hosts

Streaming hostBest forStarting priceBest featuresA2 Hosting

Best streaming host

Why it’s best: Has a variety of options that are ideal for streaming

$4.99 per month

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• 99.8% uptime
• Website builder

Bluehost

Best streaming host for scaling up

Why it’s best: Bluehost goes out of its way to make it easy for your to scale as needed

$19.99 per month

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• 99.9% uptime
• 24/7 customer support
• Database backup

DreamHost

Most streaming hosting types

Why it’s best: Offer VPS, dedicated, and cloud streaming hosting

$10 per month

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• 99.9% uptime
• Unmetered bandwidth
• Website builder

GreenGeeks

Best fully-managed streaming hosting

Why it’s best: All GreenGeeks VPS hosting plans are fully managed; include cPanel, a free SSL certificate, and a free Softaculous license.

$39.95 per month

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• 99.9% uptime
• Website builder

LiquidWeb

Best streaming hosting bundle

Why it’s best: LiquidWeb’s VPS hosting bundles combine 10 TB of bandwidth, SSD disk space, and RAM with site remediation, protection, and more

$59 per month

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• 99.9% uptime
• Website builder

How Did We Choose the Best Streaming Hosts?

Publishing audio and video content online requires significant resources. If you publish streaming media on your website, you need to select a web host that supports this content and does it well.

Some key elements you should look for when choosing a streaming host are solid-state drives (SSD), content delivery networks (CDN), scalable architecture, and reliable uptime.

These are the criteria we used in developing our list of the best streaming hosts, in addition to expert and user reviews. Read on for an in-depth explanation of what you need to know about choosing a streaming host.

What Is Streaming Hosting?

If you produce audio and video content, you may need a web host that supports streaming media. Not all of them do.

In addition, you’ll need a host that can cope with potential traffic spikes without downtime, and it’ll need to support the type of content that you intend to publish or distribute.

Is your website the next YouTube? Pandora? Spotify? You need streaming hosting if your goal is to provide video or audio-on-demand to your site’s users.

If you plan to stream movies, music, or video or audio files of any kind, streaming hosting is what will keep that media running smoothly with fewer snags and interruptions.

How To Choose a Streaming Host

Selecting the right streaming host is vitally important. The five critical features are reliability, bandwidth, storage, speed, and server power.

• Reliability — Your server needs to be constantly online. If media disappears halfway through streaming, it will frustrate people, and users are unlikely to revisit. 100% uptime is not common in the web hosting industry, and when you find it, it’s not cheap.
• Bandwidth — Bandwidth is the amount of data you can stream to your customers. If every show you need to stream is a gigabyte, you will need a lot of bandwidth. You need sufficient bandwidth to handle massive amounts of data flowing from your host to your users and the flexibility to cope with spikes in demand.
• Storage — Before audio or video can be streamed, it must be read from a file on disk. Although you won’t need as much storage as you do bandwidth, you still will need a fairly large allotment. Once you have a lot of content, you might want to put your older or less popular content on a different server. Google and Dropbox both offer excellent deals for this. But you will still want a large storage capacity on your main server.
• Speed — Nothing is more frustrating than a video or audio track that continually stops and starts. For the fastest disk speed, ensure your host uses Solid State Drives (SSDs). Many hosts now only use SSDs, and many others offer them for a relatively small extra charge. This technology is often faster than traditional spinning disk drives, which is why they are perfect for hosting streaming audio or video. What should you do if your users are spread worldwide or just want to provide the best service to the minority of your users located farther away? In these cases, you should seriously consider a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN replicates your data to servers in locations throughout the world. Users then access your files from whichever server is closest to get the fastest response times.
• Server — Streaming audio and video requires much more from a web server than just sending text and a few small images. So, if you want to stream well, you will need a powerful server.

VPS, Dedicated, or Cloud Server?

A VPS is the minimum server you should use for a streaming site. But serious sites use dedicated servers to run a completely isolated environment.

The other main option is cloud hosting. In this case, your site will be run from multiple servers in a cluster, which should help it cope with peak demand and downtime.