5 Best Video Hosting Sites for Website Owners, Marketers, and Beyond

Need a spot to store your video content? For a lot of reasons, hosting your video content by yourself isn’t a great idea. Rather than doing that, the best video hosting sites offer a solution that’s not just easier, but also performs better.

While we’ve included 5 quality video hosts on this list, your choice should come down to:

• The type of video content you want to host
• The audience preference of each hosting site
• Your need for live streaming, collaboration, or internal sharing
• Features such as video display, customization, and download options
• Policies such as content restriction and monetization support.

Five best video hosting sites that aren’t named YouTube

Here are 5 of the best video hosting sites that go beyond the ubiquitous YouTube. They’ll help you use video in your WordPress content or just generally embed video content anywhere you need it.

1. Vimeo

Vimeo is similar to YouTube in many ways, though it includes additional social sharing features. The Basic Free Plan is all you need to regularly upload a few videos for free.

The free plan comes with a storage limit of 5GB. But that’ll not do if you need increased storage or live streaming. The higher plans range between $7 and $75. Privacy options, customer support, and customization options are all linked to the plans as well.

What’ll make you happy is the unlimited bandwidth that all videos enjoy on the Vimeo player across all plans. Staying within your plan’s storage limit, you can enjoy totally ad-free display as well. Besides password protecting your videos, you can direct viewers to related videos/ links at the end of a video. Other useful features include Google Analytics and social media integration.

Pros

• Ad-free video uploads, even with free plans
• Worldwide distribution while restricting display on some domains
• Good built-in social media integrations
• There’s also an option to sell/rent your videos, as well as privacy settings for premium members

2. Dailymotion

Dailymotion is another video hosting site with many YouTube-like features. Even with the free Partner account, you have a ton of options. You can create channels to establish your very own brand, earn money from your videos, set up featured videos, and add links to websites and social media. Moreover, you’ll have no trouble editing videos and live streams to include ad-breaks or creating video clips.

To begin with, you’re allowed 96 uploads per day. What’s more, you’ll be able to upload multiple videos and entire playlists by simple drag and drop. The YouTube-like interface makes it easy to add titles, tags, description, enable comments, and even choose privacy settings. Another thoughtful feature is the Up Next Queue, though you can disable it as well.

Also, Dailymotion gives you control without the fuss. It allows distribution of your videos across your web properties, including WordPress. You simply need to paste the embed code, after verifying your domains with Dailymotion.

Pros

• All plans offer unlimited bandwidth and storage
• As for ads, they mostly appear only at the end (except when you monetize)
• It includes customizable widgets, superior player technology, and personalized branding tools
• Content management is easy from within the Media Manager with search and filter options
• Official partners can access analytics relating to social network traffic, audience retention, minutes watched, and more

However, individual video playing time is restricted to 2 hours per day (each video up to 60 minutes). One reason that Dailymotion makes it to this list of the best video hosting sites is that once you’re an official partner, it costs little to earn ad revenue, or simply share/sell videos.

3. Jetpack

Did you know that the combo of a Jetpack paid plan and a WordPress.com account can get you ad-free video hosting services within a totally WordPress environment? And you can get these videos to play within your posts by just pasting an embed code. Not only that, since the videos are stored on WordPress.com servers, they won’t eat into your storage space. While there’s a cap on storage with Jetpack Premium, the Professional has no such limits. These plans also allow you to turn on privacy settings.

Once you upgrade, VideoPress is added automatically, without extra charges for bandwidth usage and without limit on the number of video plays. VideoPress is a lightweight video player, designed specifically for WordPress. It allows you to host and embed videos in your site, and works well for files up to 1GB.

Pros

• Totally ad-free, fully optimized video hosting service for WordPress
• The ad-free video player supports multiple video formats
• It also integrates directly with the media library and post editor
• You can autoplay videos and set size limits for video containers in your post
• You can preview videos and use CSS for custom styling
• Detailed stats

In most cases, it makes sense for a regular Jetpack user, to opt for Jetpacks’s video hosting services too.

4. Wistia

Another video hosting site that gets the thumbs up is Wistia. The organized interface shows you there’s a better way to upload and customize videos.

To begin with, you can upload three videos for free. You’ll also have access to custom video tools and a branded player. The branding goes away with the paid plans. These plans start at $99/month and let you upload a maximum of 10 videos. For every additional video, there’s a payment of $0.25/month.

All free account holders will be able to customize the video player, quickly upload videos, add custom thumbnails, send out emails or shout out on social media. Not only that, free users can also password protect videos, set privacy options and integrate with existing marketing tools like MailChimp, Infusionsoft and more. What gives Wistia users an edge is lead collection from engaged users and detailed heatmaps for enhanced analytics.

Their premium plans offer even more – an unbranded player, viewer history tracking and trend graphs. Besides, CTAs, annotations and related videos help you target higher conversions.

Another area where Wistia excels is its analytics. They let you see exactly how your visitors interact with your videos.

Pros

• The 360 video-hosting adds a wow factor
• Allows high bandwidth usage
• Generates video sitemaps
• Integrates with Hubspot, Pardot, Google Analytics, and Marketo
• Detailed video analytics
• Team collaboration is possible, meaning you’ll be able to share videos internally and mark them as private too

You’ll need to keep a watch on bandwidth limits since the costs are high when you exceed these limits. What’s not to like? All videos sport the Wistia logo, if you’re a free account holder.

5. Vidyard

Vidyard finds a place in this list of best video hosting sites on account of its truly professional hosting services. Armed with powerful marketing tools, your videos stand a better chance of conversions. This feature-rich service also allows quick video upload that plays almost instantly on click.

The only downside is price – it’s not cheap, with the average customer paying $150+ per month. So this one is really only for heavy-duty sites.

Fortunately, the premium plans from Vidyard ensure that you only pay for what you use.

Despite being rich in features, navigation is easy with Vidyard. You can send video data to third-party services such as Marketo and Salesforce in an instant, both for analysis and for improved customer engagement. The service integrates smoothly with social media and supports you if your content goes viral.

Vidyard offers a wide choice of customizable unbranded video players that allow filtering based on player, videos, country etc.

Pros

• No doubt Vidyard is a highly marketing-oriented service for improved conversions
• Detailed analytics that includes viewer history, engagement and attention span
• It’s easy to add custom calls to action and conduct A/B testing for multiple video thumbnails

All these features make Vidyard top drawer consideration for the best video hosting sites, though it may prove too expensive for smaller websites.