Video content continues to be an essential content format for building your brand, communicating your messaging, and even driving revenue. Whether you’re an individual content creator or a thriving e-commerce business, video is an absolute must in today’s fast-paced digital world.

Of course, if you want to get the most value out of your video content, then you need a place online to host your content. In this post, we’ll talk about how to build a video hosting website for your brand and explain what to look for in a video hosting platform for your site.

Ready to learn how to host videos on your website? Let’s dive in!

Table of Contents

• What is a Video Hosting Website?
• Why Do You Need a Video Hosting Website?
• Building a Video Hosting Website Step-by-Step
• Top Features in a Video Website Builder
• Host Your Videos on Maestro

What is a Video Hosting Website?

A video hosting website is a platform that stores and serves online video content to site visitors. In general, this could refer to your own standalone website with video hosting capabilities or a third-party solution where you upload your content. It can also refer to video-on-demand (VOD) hosting or hosting for a video streaming website.

For our purposes, we will focus on independent video hosting platforms like Maestro. These are similar to YouTube or Vimeo but have many more features and control over how your videos are hosted, tracked, and monetized.

Why Do You Need a Video Hosting Website?

A video hosting website is valuable because it’s so versatile! It can support one or more of the goals you have for your video content: lead generation, subscription revenue, ad revenue, a hub for your podcast or social accounts, and much more.

You may choose to set up your own video hosting site to serve as a free repository of brand videos, as a paid subscription membership site with premium content for your audience, or whatever else best serves your business.

This approach is an alternative to relying on a public video host like YouTube. Most importantly, it gives you total control over your site and the content you publish. Imagine having the final say on every decision about your video content.

Building a Video Hosting Website Step-by-Step

Now that you know what a video hosting website is and why it’s valuable, let’s look at how to build a video hosting website for yourself.

The good news is modern website builder tools make it easy to do. Here are a few quick steps to keep in mind.

1. Define the Goal for Your Video Content

Before you start building a site or even creating any videos, you should sit down and define the goal of your video content. If you create videos without knowing why, then any video hosting website you build will likely be ineffective.

Ask yourself: what kind of content are you creating? Are you planning to monetize it? What budget will you be working with? Have you defined any criteria or metrics to determine whether your video strategy works? 

This step is crucial because it will help you decide which features you need in a site builder. Once you know your goal, you’re ready to pick a video website builder.

2. Choose a Site Builder

The most cost-effective way to build a video hosting website is with a site builder like Maestro. There’s a lot to appreciate about a quality WYSIWYG website builder (also known as “what you see is what you get”) like Maestro because you can easily move around content blocks and make adjustments to your site while seeing what it will look like in real-time.

Unlike other video hosting platforms, which only provide an embeddable video player you have to place somewhere else, a platform like Maestro includes native website-building functionality. Ultimately, this means you can build your video site and host the videos on it in a single tool.

We’ll touch on some additional features to look for in choosing a video website builder later in this post.

3. Set Up Your Video Hosting Website

Once you’ve chosen a video hosting platform, there are a few tasks you’ll need to run through in order to get your site up and running.

Here’s a quick list of the to-do’s, in no particular order:

• Set up your domain
• Add your logo and other brand elements
• Customize the content on your page(s)
• Configure your monetization and privacy settings

Only you can decide how much time and effort to put into this step. Having a quality site is important, but you don’t want to delay launching the site for weeks or even months while you set it up. That’s what makes a WYSIWYG website builder so helpful.

 With your video hosting website set up, it’s finally time to upload your videos.

4. Upload Your Videos

What’s a video hosting website without videos? The all-important “upload your videos” step ensures that your VOD content is ready for the world to view.

Fortunately, a good video hosting platform will have a bulk upload feature, so you won’t have to manually upload your videos one at a time. Either way, remember that with any video host, you’ll have to make sure your videos meet the file requirements. On Maestro, this is an MP4 format with a file size no greater than 10 GB.

If you work with Maestro or a similar platform, you can either upload content directly from your device or embed videos hosted on another platform (such as YouTube or Twitch) with a link. From there, make sure to edit the video’s name, file name, description, thumbnail, and tags. 

5. Launch the Site

With your site set up and your videos uploaded, you’re ready to push your site live. In some cases, this will be the push of a button to turn your site from draft mode to public. In other cases, it’s not such a dramatic step – but you’ll want to start getting traffic to your video site by adding the URL where it makes sense. 

Here are a few important places:

• Your main website (the navigation menu, the footer, on your about page, or a blog post)
• Your email marketing campaigns
• The link in your bio on Instagram or TikTok
• The “About” section of your YouTube channel
• Your business cards and other print sales collateral

Once your site is live, promotion is the name of the game. Whatever your goal, you’ll likely want to get as many eyeballs to your content as possible. A quality video website can serve as a hub to boost your brand and grow your revenue.

Top Features in a Video Website Builder

There’s not necessarily a “best” video hosting website out there, just one that’s best for you and your use case. With that in mind, here are a few top features you should watch for in a potential video hosting website.

Customization: Brand Control 

There are so many customization options on a good video hosting website that it can be difficult to cover them all in one place. But it starts with drag-and-drop block functionality that eliminates the need for deep coding or design skills, responsive across web and mobile devices.

You should also be able to showcase videos, playlists, or entire channels for your viewers. This is valuable both from a branding standpoint and from a revenue-generating standpoint: Put your highest-value content front and center to 

Monetization: Pricing vs. Revenue Potential

Some platforms charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month to host your videos and your video website. It’s important to recognize that many of these services are tailored to enterprise-level customers and charge accordingly.

Others, like Maestro, provide a graduated scale where you share some of the revenue you earn on your hosted videos – including subscriptions, tickets, tips, and Shopify – in exchange for a lower monthly price for your video hosting plan. It’s worth doing some projections and crunching numbers to find the right balance between pricing and revenue potential for your own video site.

Host Your Videos on Maestr

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We hope this post has helped you learn about video hosting websites and how to get started. Ultimately, whatever your goals are for building your own video hosting website, chances are good you’ll be able to get what you’re looking for out of Maestro.

Maestro strikes the perfect balance between the versatility and power of an enterprise-level video platform but at a much greater value that’s great for both brands and solopreneurs. Our video hosting website builder allows you to create a unique branded site for both live and on-demand videos, as well as in-depth analytics and monetization options that you won’t find anywhere else.

Are you ready to publish and monetize your own high-quality videos on Maestro? Sign up today to get started for free.

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