Glossary Terms

video hosting

Video hosting is the service of storing video files and streaming them to viewers on demand, instead of uploading the raw file to your own web server, which eats bandwidth and delivers a rough experience on slow connections. A dedicated host encodes each upload into several resolutions and serves the right one for the viewer's connection, a technique called adaptive bitrate streaming. For a WordPress site the options run from free platforms like YouTube and Vimeo's free tier (each with its own branding and data trade-offs), to paid platforms like Vimeo and Cloudflare Stream, to self-managed storage on Amazon S3 with a CDN. The core trade-off is control versus cost: YouTube is free but keeps all the audience data and may run competitor ads, while paid platforms give you privacy, a branded player, and full analytics.