How To Host Videos On Your Website? Unlimited Videos For Less Than $9!
Do you want to learn how to host videos on your website, without having to rely upon third party video hosting sites like YouTube or Vimeo?
If yes, in this article, I will show you how to host unlimited videos on your WordPress website without using any of the costlier video hosting options out there.
You don’t have to even pay hundreds of dollars every month to do this. I pay less than $9 every month to host unlimited videos. Here’s how.
Disclaimer: This method only holds good for WordPress websites and blogs. If you are using a CMS other than WordPress for your websites, this method won’t work. BTW we don’t use this service now to host our videos. We use this now to host videos and add it to our websites.
How To Host Unlimited Videos On WordPress Website?
Most people don’t know this, but you can use WordPress itself to host videos on your website.
How?
By using the ‘JetPack‘ plugin/toolkit developed by WordPress.
To host videos with Jetpack, we need to install the JetPack plugin on our website. The plugin is offered under a freemium model. Meaning, the basic features of the plugin are offered for free, and you will be charged extra for the additional features including support.
JetPack Video Hosting Plans and Features
The unlimited video hosting feature of Jetpack is not a part of the Jetpack free plan. We need to choose one of the paid plans. The paid Jetpack plan has three types. Personal, Premium and Professional. The unlimited video hosting feature is enabled in the Premium and Professional JetPack plans.
I am paying around $9 per month for the JetPack premium subscription.
Other Features
Along with being able to host unlimited videos on my website I also get access to other amazing features with JetPack premium plan. As this isn’t a Jetpack review post, I will just tell you what features I get, in brief.
- Daily backups of my website
- Malware scanning
- Site monetization tools and WordPress ad network
- SEO tools
- Site Accelerator
- Security against Brute Force attack
How To Use JetPack To Host Videos On The Website?
To get started all you need to do is install the ‘JetPack’ plugin.
If it is your first time, you will need to ‘set up’ your WordPress account. Setting up a WordPress account is somewhat similar to starting a new email account. So that shouldn’t be a problem for you.
Once you have finished setting up your WordPress account and activating the Jetpack plugin, go to the JetPack dashboard section on your website and click on the Plans tab. And then choose the plan you want for your website.
As mentioned earlier, if you want to host unlimited videos on your website, you will have to choose either the ‘Premium’ or the ‘Professional’ plan.
I recommend you to choose the ‘Premium’ plan which is more than enough for bloggers like us.
Just click on the ‘upgrade to premium‘ button and pay the charges. Once the payment is completed you can start uploading videos to your website.
Now, go back to the ‘settings’ section in your Jetpack dashboard area and click on the tab that says ‘Performance’.
Now, scroll down and activate the “High-speed, ad-free video player” option, as shown in the image below.
Now you are ready to upload videos.
Uploading Videos To JetPack Hosting
You don’t have to take any extra steps to start uploading videos to your JetPack account. You can upload videos directly to the ‘media library’ or from the inside of your WordPress post or page’s ‘add media’ section.
Although there is a limit on the ‘size of the media’ you can add from inside the WP dashboard, you can upload larger files after activating Jetpack premium or professional plan.
Once you have finished uploading the video, your video will now have share and embed features as shown in the picture below.
You can also choose to deactivate the share and embed features on each of your videos. You can also change the dimensions of the embedded video player.
Benefits Of Hosting Videos On Jetpack
The best thing about Jetpack is that it is developed by WordPress itself. So there are no compatibility issues at all. Everything flows smoothly. Here are some of the best features Jetpack has to offer.
- Embedded videos are fully optimized for WordPress sites and for mobile viewing.
- Direct integration with WordPress post editor and media library.
- High-quality videos.
- You can play Ad-free and Unbranded videos using the embedded Jetpack video player.
- Rich stats are available for both individual and overall video plays.
JetPack vs other Video Hosting Providers
As you already know, there are many platforms available to host videos these days. Some are free and some are paid.
YouTube is the most popular free platform for hosting videos. Then there are Vimeo and Wistia among numerous other video hosting solutions. Vimeo doesn’t have any free plan and Wistia has a free starter plan which only allows embedding 3 videos.
Then there is the option to directly host videos on the website using your website’s hosting service.
Here are the drawbacks of using other video hosting solutions.
If you decide to host videos directly on your website using your main web hosting, you will need to pay more for hosting and bandwidth. Hosting videos directly on your website may slow your website down.
When we use a third party video hosting platform like YouTube, we actually don’t have any control over the content we produced. YouTube can take down our video without our permission.
Also, the ‘YouTube related videos’ recommendation that shows up at the end of videos can be a real distraction and can pull the reader away from your website.
If you choose to select a paid video hosting service like Wistia, you will have to pay $99 per month for hosting and embedding only 10 videos. That’s very expensive.
Money-Back Guarantee
Jetpack offers a 30 day no questions asked money-back guarantee. And I can happily say that the money-back guarantee is really ‘no questions asked’. Whenever I canceled the Jetpack subscription for a few of my other websites within 30 days in the past, money was refunded to my account instantly.
