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One of the questions that I get asked regularly is, where I upload the videos that are meant for customers or members only? You can’t quite put them on YouTube. For the last 5 years in my business they have always been uploaded to my web host. I do have a lot of space in my hosting plans and customers don’t hit them all at the same time anyway. So that has worked out pretty well.

But this time, after re-doing BloggingStarterPack, I have increased the number of videos to 56. I had to find a way to have those videos co-exist with the old ones while I worked out the rest of the details. That kinda put a crunch on the space. Besides, since I was using WordPress to manage the content, I wanted something simple and something YouTube-like. My first thought was Vimeo. They have a new premium service called Vimeo Plus.

I did like what I saw on Vimeo Plus. For $60 a year it’s not a bad deal. Yes, you can make certain videos private and only allow domains that you choose to embed the video. And you can also choose to hide the videos from Vimeo completely.

Eventually, I went for another form of self hosting through Amazon S3. Why not Vimeo Plus since it was super easy? I’m not entirely sure either 😀 maybe it’s just the geekier side of me, like to tinker around and to see how much it would really cost me on Amazon. So far the total came to a whopping 17¢ to upload and store those 56 videos and some other stuff. Not bad.

I still haven’t given up Vimeo. If you don’t want to worry about video hosting, players and want something super easy, then Vimeo Plus is probably the answer because Amazon S3 is rather geeky and can get confusing. Of course, if you have enough space and bandwidth on your web hosting account, no reason why you can’t put it there either.