According to a 2023 survey, 87% of marketers say that incorporating video into their marketing strategies gives them a positive return on investment. 

But while video is slowly gaining popularity and breeding real results, implementing video on a website poses a few issues — slow load times, poor security, and little customization — which can turn customers away. But here’s the good news: with the right platform, organizations can eliminate the headaches, and make video one of their strongest marketing tools for lead generation.

In this blog, we’ll cover the different types of video hosting and the top 7 hosting sites to check out.

What is video hosting?

Video hosting simplifies the process of storing, managing, and delivering video content, ensuring seamless integration into client projects and marketing campaigns. 

It’s a vital tool for freelance web designers, visual developers, and agencies, as well as in-house marketing and design teams that want to make video a part of their marketing strategies. 

Why do you need a video hosting service?

With video hosting, you can create engaging marketing campaigns that resonate with your audience, like product demos, tutorials, and brand stories. You can distribute these campaigns across various channels to drive brand awareness and engagement — without having to worry about crashes or glitches. 

Though every organization has specific needs, video hosting services generally ensure optimized playback experiences across various devices and internet speeds. This optimization makes videos easy for target audiences to access and view, regardless of their location or device.

What are the types of video hosting solutions?

Not all video hosting platforms are the same. There are a few different kinds your team should consider:

• Public video hosting platforms — Platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion offer wide reach and social features, making them ideal for content creators and businesses seeking exposure. They provide free or affordable options and foster community engagement, helping marketers reach a broad audience.
• Private video hosting platforms — Services such as Wistia, Vidyard, and Brightcove offer enhanced privacy, advanced analytics, and customization options. These platforms are great for businesses and educational institutions needing secure video sharing and greater control over branding.
• Live streaming — Services such as Twitch, Facebook Live, and YouTube Live facilitate real-time interaction and audience engagement. They are perfect for gamers, event organizers, influencers, and businesses hosting live events, providing a platform for immediate viewer feedback and participation.
• Social media video hosting — Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook offer high engagement and virality potential. They are ideal for influencers, brands, and marketers targeting specific demographics, providing built-in audiences and extensive social sharing features.
• Self-hosted video solutions — Hosting videos on your own server using software like WordPress with plugins allows for full control and customization freedom. This option is best for tech-savvy users and businesses needing complete control over their content without relying on third-party services.

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 describes 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 — 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 video 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 create share options for various social media platforms to encourage people to send your video to others. These customization options also make it easier to enlarge buttons or window size for different device layouts, which is important for responsive designs.

7 of the best video hosting sites

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

1. Vidzflow

‍Vidzflow is a high-quality video hosting platform that caters to the needs of businesses and content creators. Customizable, simple to use, and perfect for any marketing campaign, Vidzflow allows users to tailor specific controls, brand videos, and optimize video load times. And the best part? It works directly with Webflow.

Why we love it:

• Customizable settings and tools
• Supports a wide variety of formats including mp4, mov, avi, mkv, mpg and webm
• Simple video upload and embed 
• Buffer-free, stall-proof playback
• High-quality video performance
• No code needed

Plans and pricing:

• Free plan available
• Lite: $9 per month 
• Starter: $19 per month
• Business: $39 per month

2. 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

3. Dailymotion

Dailymotion offers advanced video analytics, including tracking views, view-through rates, and uploads. This video hosting platform also lets you filter 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

4. 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 Brightcove for customized pricing information

5. Hippo Video

‍Hippo Video is an innovative AI-driven video platform that allows you to create interactive videos from text at scale without the need for recording. Users can transform any piece of content into an engaging video using Hippo Video's comprehensive tools — from training materials to customer support documents.

Users can also leverage interactive elements such as AI avatars, in-video CTAs, forms, polls, and surveys to create immersive videos that resonate with and engage the audience.

Why we love it:

• Instantly transform prompts, PPTs, PDFs, or blog posts into interactive videos with AI avatars
• Record video and personalize it for thousands within your CRM or sales platform
• Add video to your platform with just ten lines of code

Plans and pricing:

• Free plan available
• Pro: $20 per month per user
• Teams: $60 per month per user
• Enterprise: $80 per month per user

6. 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 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 plan available 
• Pro: $19 per month
• Plus: $59 per user per month
• Business: Contact Vidyard for more info

7. 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 videos are a good starting place when the priority is publishing content 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

With the right video hosting service, your website can nail your next big marketing strategy and keep customers interested and engaged.

By teaming up with Webflow, your organization can access dozens of powerful integrations to optimize your videos — and your business. Sign up for free →