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Video hosting

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GK2001

Experienced Member
Joined
Jul 17, 2017
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I recently decided that I'd rather not have a Google account, deleting my membership with them along with the small personal, non-monetized YouTube channel that I had. YouTube for the most part is host to the cesspit of humanity and I never fancied the exposure that I received via that avenue anyway.

I used YouTube to host videos that I embedded on a technical site that I maintained. That site is now off-line as the hosting service that I am using has gone downhill and is no longer worth their demanded price premium. My billing period is about to expire and I've flagged the account for cancellation.

I'm in no particular rush, but I'm currently exploring my options. Can anyone advise from actual experience if any of the video-hosting alternatives to YouTube are worth dealing with? An alternative of course would be hosting my videos myself, but the rare video that gets briefly promoted somewhere with high traffic might occasionally crap out due to "bandwidth" limitations. A lot of the lower-tier plans from web hosts advertised to be "unlimited" really aren't when you read the fine print.
 
Ive been going thru something similar myself. TBH there arent any other good platforms out there for nerds... Kinda stuck with youtube unfortunately if you want views. Maybe a collab with vintage sites to have one video repo would be a good way to go? Now getting atari age / vcf / vogons / retrocomputing etc on the same page is going to be a challenge.
 
Here's a thought experiment that does nothing to help the poster figure out where to host their videos. Let's say it's 1994, the Web is very new, and you've just cracked open a fresh new index.html in $HOME/public_html/ of your university shell account. You've even got a nice (non-animated, that's not really a thing yet) GIF picture of yourself from a karaoke night or something --- you've just scanned the photo in the computer lab scanner, cropped it in Photoshop 2.5 and dithered it down into the web-safe colour palette. It's a 92 kilobyte masterpiece, a bit of a big file, but it's interlaced of course so that you don't have to wait for the whole thing to load before you can get a top-to-bottom picture.

Of course you just have karaoke.gif sitting in your public_html directory like everything else; where else would it go? But let's fast-forward to today. A ten-minute HD video file could be about 1.5 GiB, nearly 16,000 times the size of the image.

Note that ratio... Back then you might have had a 200 MiB hard drive in the computer in your dorm room; the 2 TiB drive in today's machine is itself 10,000 times larger. Anyone who's somehow dialing up at this point, using Mosaic with the help of the brand-new Trumpet Winsock, is probably connecting via a 14.4 kbps v32bis modem, nearly 14,000 times slower than their 200 megabit home connection today.

Apples and oranges maybe, but at least it's not apples and peppercorns or apples and Epcot Center --- the ratios aren't too far off. So, if in some improbable way, the internet were only deployed to the world today with otherwise the same tech we have now, would we even bother with centralised video hosting sites at all? Or would it just not be obvious at all to do that and instead we'd just host videos all over the place, the same way we host images today, and the same way we hosted things like karaoke.gif nearly 30 years ago?
 
Some web hosts still treat bandwidth and storage space like gold. I need to move some of my old videos off of youtube (youtube is all advertising these days) and put them on my personal web site, but I don't know that I have enough allocated space or transfer usage.
 
I've gone through the same evolution as you, except that I kept my YouTube channel, but started delaying releases there by one week to try to drive people to the alternate platforms.

Odysee is pretty good, although it can be slow sometimes.

BitChute's underlying technology is superior, but it has the reputation of being too spicy for normies.

In my opinion though, while I think that Odysee is a very nice platform, it's still a proprietary walled garden of sorts. I think that the only way we'll get out of our current problems is to move to federated media platforms, wherein we can self-host but still be a part of a larger federated social network through peering.

en.wikipedia.org

Fediverse - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org


To this end, I've set up Matrix as a Discord replacement, and am slowly (I have a pretty busy RL, heh) fiddling my way towards getting PeerTube going as a YouTube replacement and Mastodon going as a Twitter/Disgracebook replacement. It is of course possible to just join existing instances of these services, but I am doing it the hard way and self-hosting all my own stuff just because, lol.

I will continue to post my content to Odysee, as well as delayed by one week to YouTube, but PeerTube will give me that feeling of security of knowing that (barring some kind of extreme DNS covfefe) there's no practical way for me to get canceled.

I mean it's not like my stuff is particularly edgy or odious, although I do make the occasional snarky political comment. It's more the principle of the thing, and the desire to help make these federated platforms a more attractive alternative for the general public by putting my normie content on there. Helping to tame the wild west, as it were. Or something.

Do please let me know where to find your content once you get going on alt-tech. We've gotta stick together and support each other if we ever want the open platforms to get widespread enough to seem viable to the general public.. If I can help with anything, see the link in my sig to contact me.

Good luck bro.
 
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SomeGuy said:
Some web hosts still treat bandwidth and storage space like gold.
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What I don't get is why things haven't really progressed in that regard in years. Take for instance the fine print for the Shared Hosting plans offered by Namecheap:


Disk Usage Provision. The content on your website must be linked from an HTML or similarly coded web page with all content is freely available to the public. Your website must consist of web pages of a standard design, essentially HTML based text and graphics. Your hosting account should consist mostly of html and php files.

Downloadable files, media, databases must comply with the following limitations:
  • A maximum of 10GB of a shared hosting account can be allocated to music, video or other multimedia files including but not limited to .aac, .avi, .mp3, .mp4, .mpeg, .jpg, .png, .gif files;
  • A maximum of 10GB of a shared hosting account can be allocated to any archive and disk image files containing the complete contents and structure of a data storage medium;
  • A maximum of 10GB of a shared hosting account can be allocated to databases and database dumps including but not limited to .sql files;
  • A maximum of 10GB of a shared hosting account can be allocated to Executable files and all other files which are the result of compiling a program.
  • As a part of disk usage optimization, error_log files on our Shared and Reseller servers are size-limited to 10MB per file and 1000 rows with the latest logs.
blah, blah, blah.......
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That applies to their "20 GB", "50 GB" and "Unmetered GB" plans.

It's always a good idea to dig out and read the fine print. If you just blindly followed the misleading marketing BS and forked out the extra cash for the "Unmetered" (or even the 50 GB!) plan under the assumption that that offered a storage space advantage as far as your multimedia files go, then you'd have made an incorrect assumption.

This is the same level of storage that was generally available when I first signed up for a Shared Hosting plan over a decade ago. OK, it's SSD now, but I would have guessed that things might have advanced in terms of actual storage space provided in that time too.

VPS and Dedicated Server hosting are out of the question in terms of cost as far as what I'm prepared to pay for what is only a hobby website.
 
Well "cheap" is in the name, it shouldn't be a surprise. All shared hosting is massively oversold with thousands of accounts on a single server. If you start using too many resources they will kick you off. Otherwise facebook could get hosted for $3/month.

Storage costs have decreased but you have to consider other factors like increased energy and support costs.
 
Well, in Namecheap's defense, they're at least transparent in their Terms of Service, which cannot be said for some other hosts I've been digging through.

Storage costs have decreased but you have to consider other factors like increased energy and support costs.
Click to expand...

Well I don't have reliable figures at hand for any of those things (and who knows how many other variables and factors) so I'll refrain from purporting to have figured out the truth of the matter.
 
bladamson said:
Do please let me know where to find your content once you get going on alt-tech. We've gotta stick together and support each other if we ever want the open platforms to get widespread enough to seem viable to the general public.. If I can help with anything, see the link in my sig to contact me.

Good luck bro.
Click to expand...


I dunno. I clicked on the link to Odysee and amount of excrement that filled my screen gives me pause to ever go there again. To be honest, none of the alternatives to YouTube are looking particularly appealing and given that Shared Hosting looks to be generally just as constrained today as it was over a freaking decade ago I'm really having second thoughts about my plans to build upon or even resurrect my hobby web presence at all.

What would be cool is if there was a video-hosting service exclusively moderated for technical/scientific/educational content, but there isn't.
 
The problem is that these alternative platforms tend to attract people who got kicked off YouTube for violating their community guidelines, thus they are flooded with political conspiracy theorists, racists, anti-Semites, anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers, etc.

Vimeo used to be one viable alternative that did its best to keep out the riff-raff, but a few years ago they drastically tightened their upload restrictions for free accounts. Now it's limited to 500 MB per week and 5 GB total storage.
 
Yeah, it's that kind of content that rules out all of the alt platforms for me. I don't want that stuff. If there's a federated or decentralised community that doesn't have it and probably won't have it in the future, then I'd honestly love to hear about it.
 
If there's a federated or decentralised community that doesn't have it and probably won't have it in the future, then I'd honestly love to hear about it.
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I wonder if that's something that an entity like Hackaday could pull off. Video hosting could be integrated into or linked to the Hackaday.IO ecosystem. They already have a huge association with (mostly YouTube-based) content producers within the "maker" community, which they regularly promote on the Hackaday blog. To get the ball rolling, I'm sure many could be persuaded to shift over to or at least mirror their content on the alternative platform. I have no idea if an extension of their current business model could adequately fund such a venture. At the very least they'd have to hire some competent developers because the current Hackaday.IO ecosystem seriously sucks balls, IMO.

These are just some idle thoughts.
 
stepleton said:
Yeah, it's that kind of content that rules out all of the alt platforms for me. I don't want that stuff. If there's a federated or decentralised community that doesn't have it and probably won't have it in the future, then I'd honestly love to hear about it.
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You can run your own instance of whichever federated service you prefer, and set the rules and moderate it however you like. To expect the larger internet to moderate their own speech to conform to your personal sensibilities is, in my opinion at least, unrealistic and somewhat uncomfortably fascistic/authoritarian.

This is what is nice about the federated platforms: You run your own instance however you want (or join one that supports values similar to your own), but you can still interoperate with other instances if you wish. To categorize all of the Fediverse as "extremist" or whatever because some of its instances allow extremist content is like saying that email is "extremist" because some mail servers forward "extremist" content.

If you want your feed to be moderated, you need to moderate it yourself. Expecting Tech Daddy to do it for you en-masse is what got us into our current mess to begin with.

(I apologize if the above reads as a bit abrasive. It is not my intention.)
 
bladamson said:
If you want your feed to be moderated, you need to moderate it yourself. Expecting Tech Daddy to do it for you en-masse is what got us into our current mess to begin with.

(I apologize if the above reads as a bit abrasive. It is not my intention.)
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I was pretty careful when I said "community" in my post. I don't want "tech daddy" to do anything, I want a community of people with established norms who collectively agree on and maintain boundaries that match my (fairly ordinary, for where I live) values. This is not the same as moderating the "larger internet" --- nobody here was talking about anything like that anyway.

As I said, I'd be glad for someone to identify a part of the "fediverse" that's a good fit for me --- after all, the capability you're talking about suggests that it's possible. For now, nothing like that seems to exist, since the well-known alt platforms have a lot of the content @vwestlife mentioned, and I have better things to do than sift through all of that. (Watching videos is supposed to be part of my leisure time --- you know, enjoyable.) When I said "all of the alt platforms" were ruled out for me, it may have been technically unfair to dismiss every last one of them, but from what I can tell, either they're big and "too spicy for normies", or they're small and don't really have much to offer me. I don't think my feelings here are too unusual.
 
I was going to go on a whole spiel about how websites used to die when people stopped liking them but it seems that entire "lifecycle" went out the window years ago when these big tech moguls like Google and whatever Facebook is called this week took over everything.

I still do YouTube but I still do it the old way. I don't get a lot of hits, I don't care, I don't make money at it - I'm doing it for fun. I have considered - at times - backing up all 500+ of my old videos and moving to a new service (or better yet, just remaking the old content updated at a new place). I feel bad for anyone trying to start a channel and gain some views today because it's not as easy as it once was when I was starting out. At one point I was fairly popular for my guitar videos but I knew as soon as google bought out YouTube it was merely a matter of time before the fun-times of making videos and interacting with poeople would turn into making videos to shill for things like Nordspace or SquareVPN.

The problem is, the only other service out there is Dailymotion and when you take a look there you start to think "heck, YouTube looks better" because at least there I don't see a front page full of glossy corporate-produced news, sports, music, and entertainment videos that likely have millions of dollars of production behind them. Sure, if you search, you'll find some guy from eight years ago talking about his Jazzmaster or playing some NES game in the same quality as my old stuff, but you don't see anyone doing something NEW like that anymore. I dont' even think LGR or Digital Basement could hold up on Dailymotion based on what I saw - they'd get buried by Ukriane, the Green Bay Packards, and J-Lo brought to you by MSNBC, MTV, and ESPN.

Honestly, a part of me feels the web has truly "jumped the shark" at this point. It's a big part of why I hang around the retro-computing circles so much more than I talk about my guitar stuff anymore, I'd rather go hang out on older tech like BBSes with real humans and people who enjoy the process as much as the reward of using the tech. It's just turned into highly-interactive cable TV now, complete with advertising and multi-million dollar production. Me, I like my old and ancient "cable access-at-best" quality standards because it means I don't need to invest too much into it to get a "good" result that I like.
 
creepingnet said:
Honestly, a part of me feels the web has truly "jumped the shark" at this point.
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Well, how much of this is simply that content creators aren't willing to pony up the $$$ for their bandwidth to show their content?

There's a reason hosting on YouTube et al is "free".
 
Hosting your own content is fairly easy - the standard LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack is well understood.

Where you get into trouble is on bandwidth. If you run your own virtual machine to host your site you are going to be paying for bandwidth by the gigabit. If you go with a shared host you will get some free quota, but risk getting charged or kicked off when you exceed that free quota. Video requires a long of bandwidth, so most shared hosts are not going to be appropriate for video.

YouTube works because they can cover the bandwidth. Like NetFlix, Amazon and the other big players they handle the distribution, including providing caches in geographic locations to cut down on the bandwidth costs. But yes, there is the trade-off ... The other video sharing sites can do the job, but I cringe every time I see a link to Daily Motion or Vimeo, and the lesser known sites are even worse. They don't do the job as well as YouTube, and the content can be pretty sketchy.

If you do want to host things yourself, try to minimize the bandwidth by being aggressive with compression. You can always link to a higher bandwidth version that is slightly harder to get to to cut down on the overall bandwidth requirement. And know your bandwidth costs up front to avoid surprises. Or just go back to text web pages. :) (People are overusing video these days.)
 
I guess there is a bit of a misunderstanding here. Perhaps my fault, but by "hosting the videos myself" I meant keeping the video files on the host server along with the rest of my website files and data, not actually operating my own physical server.

I do compress all of my videos. So far the majority of my technical-content videos are very short (less than 1 min.) and under 100 MB - things like oscilloscope screen waveforms, homebrew computer boot up sequences and the sort. The majority of these only received a dozen or less views per month via my general site traffic and they could all be put on a shared hosting plan without issue. Some other major-project videos are significantly larger and did clock up thousands of views very quickly when associated with a project promoted on the Hackaday blog or on The Register, etc. These sorts of technical-content videos will have to be hosted elsewhere.

So far, I have opened a "Basic" account with Vimeo (a Google account not required) and am currently uploading. The 500 MB file size limit is a pain and I will have to trim some of my videos a bit to get then under. I'll have to forget about uploading any multi-GB project videos and some non-technical stuff (vroom-vroom racing and mountain bike GoPro footage and other stuff) for now. If embedding content from Vimeo works out well I might eventually upgrade to a rudimentary payed account.
 
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