Glossary Terms

self-hosted video

Self-hosted video means storing and serving your video files from infrastructure you control, your own server or a cloud store like Amazon S3, instead of embedding from YouTube or Vimeo. The appeal is control: no third-party logos or recommended videos, no viewer data handed to someone else's tracking, and a player you can style however you like. The hard parts are the bandwidth bill (video files are big and every view costs transfer), transcoding into multiple resolutions yourself, and the latency of serving video worldwide from one location. A practical middle path pairs S3 storage with a streaming CDN like Cloudflare Stream or Bunny.net, keeping ownership without building a full streaming operation.