Hosting Your Guru Videos

Course lessons are always better with videos but where should you host them?

You have two options:

• On your server;
• On a video hosting site such as YouTube or Vimeo.

Hosting the Videos on Your Server

Hosting the videos on your own server might give you greater control over your content but it also has three major disadvantages:

• Speed — Uploading videos with FTP can take a long time and slow down your computer.
• Size — Video files are large and take up a lot of space on your server. As your courses grow, so will the space required for videos.
• Safety — With such big files on your server, backing up your site take a long time, as will restoring your data.

Hosting your Videos on a Video Hosting Site

With such serious disadvantages arguing against hosting your videos on your own server, it’s no wonder that sites like YouTube and Vimeo are so popular.

Video hosting sites are free and allow you to upload quickly. You can then use the videos’ URLs to add them to Guru.

You’ll be able to upload fast, sometimes even with a desktop uploader. You won’t need to take space on your own server, and backing up and restoring won’t take any longer than usual.

As you can tell, I highly recommend hosting your Guru videos on a video hosting site and not on your server. And as we’ll see in the next article, you don’t even have to give up privacy.