- You are here:
- Home
- Blog
- S3MediaVault
- Storing Video & Audio On Your Website (Hint: Don’t!)
Do NOT use your web host to store audio or video files (or even PDF/Zip/Doc etc). Regular web hosts (think Godaddy, Dreamhost, Hostgator, etc – which are terrible web hosts, by the way) are not suited for media hosting, not even if you have a VPS or Dedicated Server.
If you’re a podcaster and host your MP3 files on your own server (you shouldn’t be using WAV files for podcasting, by the way), then when you release a new episode, your RSS feed could get hundreds (or hopefully thousands) of hits, and that will in turn download thousands of copies of your mp3 file. And that can put a great strain on your web host.
CDN’s like CloudFront and CloudFlare were created just for this reason – because regular web hosts cannot handle massive amounts of media downloads, especially if they happen concurrently.
And if you’re an Online Course Creator and you have Audio, Video and PDF in your courses, and you release a new course, or do a launch, then when a (even reasonably) large number of your members try to access your online course, that means potentially hundreds (or thousands) of requests to your video, audio and pdf. That could cause the same kind of spike in server utilization on your web host. That kind of load increase on your website could cause problems for your members: Website being too slow, errors when trying to log in and navigate through your membership site, videos and audio loading very slowly (or not at all), your website crashing and your members can’t even get to your member’s area, etc.
So for various technical and logical reasons, it’s never a good idea to host your media files – Audio, Video or PDF (zip,doc,etc) – on your own web site.
Podcasters: Use a regular podcast host like Libsyn (what I use and recommend; coupon code subscribeme gets you up to 2 months free) , BluBrry or PodBean. Or if you must host your own RSS feed, you can do that with PowerPress, but don’t host the actual files on your own server. Use a quality podcast host for that. And DO NOT use Google Drive or Dropbox or some free hosting site for this. It’s against the TOS of many of those services, plus free hosts can disappear overnight, and they’re still not optimized for audio delivery for podcasts.
Online Course Creators using WordPress: Store the files on Amazon S3 and use a plugin like S3MediaVault.com to securely embed your members-only content in your website from a fast and powerful media hosting service like Amazon S3, and then add CloudFront to it to deliver it at blazing-fast speeds.
What Next?
Check out this article How (and Why) to use Amazon S3 to Deliver Audio, Video and PDF on your WordPress website
About the Author
Ravi Jayagopal is a Business Coach, 8-time Author, Speaker, Podcaster, Entrepreneur, Digital Marketer, WordPress Developer and also an Amateur Ventriloquist :-). Read more about him at https://SubscribeMe.fm/ravi-jayagopal
Related Posts
Amazon S3 Pricing Calculator
How To Reduce S3 and CloudFront Video Hosting Costs
S3 vs. YouTube vs. Vimeo
Podcasting with WordPress: The Do’s and Don’ts of Creating and Hosting Your Podcast Feed and Audio
25 Video Course Creation Tips For Online Course and Digital Creators
17 Things Entrepreneurs and Digital Creators (Like You) Can Learn from a Programmer (Like Me)
Members-Only Content Protection: Fact and Fiction
Video Resolution Switcher