
Should you host your own videos, or should you turn towards some of the free video hosting services out there to do it for you? This is an internal battle going on with many web hosting providers out there – and I’m going to tell you why the second choice might be the better one for you.
Video Sharing, Converting and Playing are All Server Killers
The number one reason why you should not host your own videos, is simply put in two words, server resources. By outsourcing this task to a place like YouTube, Revver, and other online video sharing services, you take the load video hosting and distributing takes on a server. For those of you using shared hosting services, this is particularly important, because you want to keep your resource usage as low as possible.
Open Your Videos Up to a Wider Audience, to Gain More Eyeballs
My second reason for saying you should not host your own video content is for marketing reasons. Stop and think for a minute, who gets more traffic – you or YouTube? YouTube would be the obvious answer to many. Now, how could you turn that to your advantage?
- Publish videos people are looking for
- Make sure to include your brand name and domain name
Now you are creating one more way for people who might be randomly surfing for content via YouTube (or any other video sharing service out there) to find your videos, and your web site.
If you have the resources to host your own videos, because you do not fear the server resource issue, chances are you don’t need to market yourself using these means. However, for us small guys and gals in the wild and wacky world of web hosting, we need every advantage we can take – and this is one free service available to you worth taking advantage of.



The reasons as to why Yahoo! dropped the ball with Geocities will be a great debate over the next year or so. However, I feel the main reason Geocities ended up fading off into the sunset is that Yahoo failed to evolve the product into what people needed.
The core foundation of any web host is a great support team. With that, almost anything else can be overlooked. What is the reason for that? Well, good support is hard to find these days. So if you are a web host or a worker in the industry, I am going to give you some advice that will make sure you provide that support, in a way that the customers will enjoy.
Want to know the secret to a speedier web site? Well, if you are looking for a weekend project to help you site perform better, I have the best one you can get started with.





How Should Web Hosts Adapt to the Social Web?
A lot of the appeal of Facebook or Twitter is that you catch people in the buff. No, not that there are a lot of nudist on the social networks. What I mean is there is a lot of “raw” and “un-edited” thoughts out there. Of course, that isn’t to say you can’t organized your “raw” thoughts before you get them out there.
How should web hosts act on social networks? It is all about striking the right balance of many different things you want to get out into the public. Here are a few topic ideas.
Support Updates – Having a major problem that is effecting many customers? Rather than hiding under your desk and sucking your thumb, it might be better to get out there in the angry mob and let them know what is going on. For the most part 95% of the population out there will be ok with disaster, as long as they know what is going on. Just think how happy those people on the Titanic would have been, for example, if the ship had a better PR person. It is something to think about.
Plug Yourself and Market to All – If you have a good following of people requesting to be your friend, you need to make sure you strike a good balance between giving your current followers something they can use, and also give the searchers out there a reason to look into you. Half you marketing posts should be focused towards your base and the other half should be focused toward potential customers.
So there you have it, follow these steps and you will finally have something to do on that Twitter account or Facebook fan page you haven’t touched in a while.