I forgot: go to https://letsencrypt.org/ to learn how to get a (free) certificate so you can do https.
You might be thinking that you don’t want to learn about all of that just to host some videos, and that’s reasonable. But there is a tradeoff. Either let someone else control your content and live under the threat of arbitrary takedowns, or learn what you need to control your own stuff.
If you get popular you will have to deal with bandwidth issues, because video is huge. That’s one reason even people who are capable of hosting on their own turn to platforms like YouTube.
You can look into Vimeo. For some reason it's not mentioned often as an alternative to YouTube, but it seems to be better in almost every way.
>You can look into Vimeo. For some reason it's not mentioned often as an alternative to YouTube, but it seems to be better in almost every way.
The "Vimeo better in almost every way" needs to be re-calibrated based on the typical reasons that content creators' such as this piano teacher use Youtube.
The many ways that Vimeo is worse:
- platform membership fees: Youtube is $0 to upload and host, Vimeo used to be $240 and now has some new pricing plans[1] with a low-use free tier (too limited for high-res 4k uploads)
- smaller audience : Youtube is ~2 billion users, Vimeo ~200 million
- no advertising partners : Youtube enables monetization
- less recommendations leading to discovery of your videos because less catalog of content from others to expose viewers to your video: Youtube has dozens of Beethoven Moonlight Sonata piano tutorials, Vimeo has none[2]
And btw, Vimeo also removes videos. Previous comment about someone following advice of switching from Youtube to Vimeo which didn't solve his problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20347254
Vimeo is a good platform but it's not mentioned as often as alternative to Youtube because it doesn't solve the same problems for many Youtubers. Also, self-hosting with Apache web server and HTML5 <video> tag also doesn't solve the same problem. And Peertube+Patreon doesn't solve the same problem.
You might be thinking that you don’t want to learn about all of that just to host some videos, and that’s reasonable. But there is a tradeoff. Either let someone else control your content and live under the threat of arbitrary takedowns, or learn what you need to control your own stuff.
If you get popular you will have to deal with bandwidth issues, because video is huge. That’s one reason even people who are capable of hosting on their own turn to platforms like YouTube.
You can look into Vimeo. For some reason it's not mentioned often as an alternative to YouTube, but it seems to be better in almost every way.