According to video production company Wyzowl’s 2023 survey, 91% of businesses are prioritizing video content in 2023, and 96% of marketers consider video an important part of their strategies. No matter the website you’re designing, you should be thinking about how to incorporate video content, even if you aren’t currently using it.

Prioritizing video can introduce all sorts of issues, like incorrect sizing on video players when users transfer between devices or slower load times due to large file sizes. The best way to avoid these hiccups is to use a high-performance video hosting website.

What are the types of video hosting?

To share that excellent video content, you’ve got two options: self-hosting videos on your own site or using a video hosting platform.

Self-hosting on a website means moving video files from your local storage (your Google Drive, for example) to the server hosting the site (like Webflow). When someone opens a webpage, the site loads the video directly with all other files on that site, thanks to the host server processing and displaying the content. No intermediary platform or person manages the video content.

Self-hosting ensures all video content on the site is under your control: It’s more difficult for others to copy your video and use it illegally. There’s no need to worry about the video host’s copyright policies or their enforcement, and it also dodges annoyances like in-player ads that some video hosts, like YouTube, require. Self-hosting also allows designers to customize the video player’s exact appearance and function, like buttons and icons.

But self-hosting’s biggest roadblock is that hosting from the same server takes up an immense amount of bandwidth, usually more than everything else on the page combined — especially since HD videos are the default these days. That means videos can take too long to load and may pause to buffer frequently, depending on a user’s internet connection, which can drive viewers away. Self-hosting videos could even slow down the entire website.

Self-hosted background videos may also negatively affect a website experience, even if people aren’t watching them. Bandwidth demand can slow website load times, potentially frustrating visitors. Managing the quality and compatibility of videos across different web browsers and devices is difficult, given the varying formats and codecs supported by each platform.

These challenges and drawbacks are why many turn to video hosting websites. Given the large file size of videos, video hosting helps smooth performance issues by allowing a middle platform to take care of processing, load times, and scaling the clip across devices and browsers. Assigning videos to a separate player and hosting service improves website load times and allows visitors to play videos more readily, even with less-than-ideal internet connections. Video hosting services also provide ready-made video player interfaces designed for usability.

Choosing the best video hosting platform for you

To choose the best third-party hosting platform for your video content, consider factors like:

Price

Video hosts can be free, subscription based, or price tiered. Paid services tend to offer more analytics and content management options, like adding custom calls to action (CTAs) and branding to the video player. You’ll need to consider your budget and how important these features are to you.

Embed options

Look for comprehensive embedding options that allow you to add a video anywhere you need, such as marketing campaign content across emails, social posts, and landing pages. Your hosting service should offer these embed options in whatever format you need.

Metadata options

Designer-friendly video hosting sites let you add snippets that automatically populate with your videos so you don’t have to find a way to support this critical metadata yourself.

Metadata is responsible for describing other data. For example, this article has a meta description outlining what the article’s about. It also has image descriptions built into the HTML copy to help search engines like Google index the site and decide where to place it in search results.

Having metadata automation is a huge timesaver, as video-rich snippets are beneficial for better website search engine optimization (SEO), helping your website rank higher in Google search results and receive more traffic.

Accessibility

Some hosts let you include transcripts or captions for videos, which are crucial for accessibility. Competent video players automate these tasks so you don’t forget to add this data when uploading your video.

Analytics

Analytics provide valuable insights into viewer behavior and engagement — like audience retention, click-through rates, and video completion rates — to help you refine and enhance your video content.

Metrics like total views, play duration, and engagement rates (comments, likes, favorites) are key indicators of the impact and performance of your videos. The number of total views provides insight into the reach and popularity of your videos, while play duration and engagement rates point to how long viewers watch and interact with them.

Audience demographics, including location, age, and gender, can also help you tailor your video content to a specific audience. For example, if you discover a significant portion of your audience is from Latin America, you can include Spanish subtitles to improve the viewing experience for that demographic.

Customization

A customizable player makes the web design process more cohesive because you can alter the appearance based on your needs, brand, and target audience. It allows you to adapt the player to your website content’s design or color scheme, or you could create share options for various social media platforms to encourage people to send your video to others. And sometimes, enlarging buttons or window size for different device layouts is important for responsive designs.

6 of the best video hosting sites

Here are six video hosting options we’ve found work particularly well for web designers who want customization options and robust analytics.

1. SproutVideo

SproutVideo is one of the best video hosting options for advanced analytics and optimization, which help you manage large lists of videos with their own stats to track. The platform allows you to monitor play numbers, play rates, hours watched, and average engagement. You can even dig down to the domains where your video is most popular, the geographic popularity of videos, and popularity over time.

Why we love it:

• Responsive inline, lightbox, and email embed codes
• Subtitle support using WebVTT and SRT standard
• Custom color themes, thumbnails, and controls for video players
• Comprehensive audience demographics and video engagement metrics

Plans and pricing:

• 30-day free trial
• Seed: $10 per month
• Sprout: $35 per month
• Tree: $75 per month
• Forest: $295 per month

2. Dailymotion

Dailymotion offers advanced video analytics including tracking views, view-through rates, uploads, and more. This video hosting platform also lets you set filters for what’s most important or view stats in real time to see which videos are getting attention right now.

Analytics are available on the platform or through an application programming interface (API), depending on how you prefer to work. You can also use Google Analytics with Dailymotion to optimize your content for Google’s search criteria. Even more impressive, most features are available at no cost, making Dailymotion an excellent video hosting service for limited budgets.

Why we love it:

• Custom embed scripts with native SDK support
• Full metadata options including title, tags, description, upload date, duration, and thumbnail URL
• Subtitle support using SRT standard
• Custom color themes, watermarks, and controls for video players
• Analytics for video engagement metrics and audience demographics

Plans and pricing:

• Primarily free; contact for enterprise-level quotes

3. Brightcove

Brightcove is an enterprise-level suite of services for video marketing. This online video hosting platform specializes in monetization and engagement so your video content gains visibility and brings in revenue through ads. Brightcove also offers integrations with other tools like Zencoder for cloud video encoding, Media Studio for video distribution and revenue, and Audience Insights for detailed analytics. It’s famously reliable, reporting 99.99% uptime and providing high-level video protection to prevent misuse.

Why we love it:

• IFrame and in-page embed codes
• Custom metadata fields
• Subtitle support through player native caption generation, custom subtitle tracks, and WebVTT
• Full player customization through CSS and JavaScript
• Real-time analytics for video engagement metrics and audience demographics, as well as customizable reporting

Plans and pricing: 

• Contact for customized pricing information

4. Hippo Video

Hippo Video offers robust sales and consumer communication tools, allowing you to spin a video into hundreds of personalized versions with just a click, then share. That’s helpful when you’re sending customized email videos, for example, where pop-ups can show customer names as a way to connect with them. Hippo Video also includes a robust template and editing system so users can quickly choose an existing look when uploading content rather than creating their own, plus detailed control over how viewers can interact with the video.

Why we love it:

• Inline and popover embed codes
• URL metadata
• Subtitle support through player native caption generation, custom subtitle tracks, and WebVTT
• Full player customization through HTML5, including thumbnails, titles, and end screens
• Real-time analytics for video engagement metrics and audience demographics, as well as customizable reporting

Plans and pricing:

• Starter: $15 per month per user
• Pro: $30 per month per user
• Growth: $48 per month per user
• Enterprise: $79 per month per user

5. Vidyard

Vidyard offers a free option and priced tiers starting at $19 per month. Marketing and design professionals will want the paid tier, as it includes unlimited video support, CTA creation, and more in-depth analytics. These metrics help both marketers and designers track what people interact with and encourage conversions on webpages with video content.

Vidyard’s system offers high-quality, ad-free video hosting — an ideal choice for small businesses that take their video seriously.

Why we love it:

• Responsive inline, lightbox, and email embed codes

Plans and pricing:

• Free (but limited at 25 videos and offers no analytics, metadata, or player customization)
• Pro: $19 per month
• Business: Contact for more info

6. YouTube

You or your clients may already use YouTube for video playlists and have developed channels with original content. If that’s the case, stick with YouTube embedding and use its built-in analytics options. It’s not as comprehensive as our other choices and contains ads, but YouTube is a good starting place when the priority is publishing videos right away and showing up on search engines.

Why we love it:

• IFrame embedding and IFrame Player API support with full parameter control
• Metadata support for title, description, and tags
• Comprehensive subtitles support for multiple file extensions, including SRT standard, WebVTT, and SAMI
• Customization of player controls, autoplay, progress bar color, language preference, and video looping
• Analytics for video engagement metrics and audience demographics

Plans and pricing: 

• Free, but may require developer work for analytics

Host your videos through Webflow

Choosing the best video hosting service is a great first step to providing this much-wanted content to your viewers.

Webflow’s no-code visual web development platform allows you to embed and customize videos right from the site builder. Learn more about how it works and sign up to start building your next website with Webflow today.