Having videos on your website is a good idea. Well made videos can clearly explain your products or services. They create emotion. They connect with people. There are also SEO benefits because your website can also be found with video searches.
When you decide to put videos on your website, one thing to think about is where the videos will be hosted. They are larger files so things like website storage space and bandwidth come into play.
For most websites, it makes sense to use YouTube when you want to put videos on your website.
No Bandwidth Charges
For one, your website hosting account is not being charged bandwidth. Bandwidth is like how much water you're putting through a pipe. Most hosting account allow ample bandwidth, so you don't have to worry about it. When your website starts serving videos, then bandwidth is suddenly a concern because those files are much larger than just text and images. If your video file is 8 MB and it's downloaded 5 times a day, then that's 40 MB per day of bandwidth you're using. Then 40 MB per day turns into about 1.2 GB of bandwidth for the month.
By using YouTube, even though the video is embedded on a web page on your website, the bandwidth is from YouTube.
Extra Search Results and More Traffic
Secondly, if you title your video well and add a good description with keywords, then that video could start showing up well in search results and get you extra traffic. A link from the YouTube website to your website is another incoming link, so that's a benefit.
Third, there are people searching for things on YouTube and that's yet one more place where something you have (your video) can show up in a search result.
The only real downside to using YouTube videos on your website is that there is YouTube logo and they might show some ads or link to other related videos (but the suggested videos can be turned off). If that's a concern, then you might make the decision to pay for any extra bandwidth that is needed and host the videos on your website instead.
Here's a good article with more about why you might not want to host your videos on YouTube:
Should You Use YouTube Videos on Your Website? (webstix.com)
With some websites we make, we may need your YouTube username and password so that we can login to your account and create the appropriate video player for your website. Otherwise, just links (URLs / web page addresses) to your videos will suffice since we can use the embed code found on those pages.
Another option you have is to host the videos yourself using your own hosting (which might be our hosting if you choose that option). The benefits are that you don't have ads or the YouTube logo on your videos. There are no suggested videos at the end either. The downsides are that you might not get extra traffic from YouTube but you can also host the video on YouTube if you like - you still have that option.
Your video will need to be converted to HTML5 video so that it works on any device (including iPhones and iPads, which have no support for Flash or Flash video). We can help with that if you need that done.
Here are your options:
Which option would you like?
