USE CASE

Hosting videos for (premium) online courses

WHY I BOUGHT THIS DEAL

If you are creating online courses, you can divide all your SaaS expenses into 2 buckets: Must haves. And nice to haves.

And hosting is one of the only 2 items which are 'must haves' (the other being email marketing).

You want to be careful with what you choose.

Unfortunately, most hosts are very stingy with storage space and bandwidth. And because video files are bulky, you have to look for dedicated video hosting.

So, here are the options I looked at:

1. YouTube: The big daddy of them all. Will give you unlimited storage, and amazing performance. If you want to make your videos public, look no further. In fact, you have to be on YouTube. You don’t have a choice.

But if you want to limit access to only users of your premium courses, you have to set the YouTube videos as unlisted and use an add on service like vooPlayer (they call it hybrid hosting) to serve it.

Problem is, unlisted YouTube videos can be found out. There are search strings you can Google. And there is even a dedicated website that archives unlisted YouTube videos.

And if that’s not enough, vooPlayer takes a bit of loading time (anywhere from 7 to 13 seconds on my WordPress page). So, your premium users will have a slow experience.

Videos on Publitio are obviously harder to find than on YouTube. And its player loads faster (in about 1.5 to 2 seconds on my WordPress page).

So, Publitio is a better choice than YouTube for our specific purpose.

2. Vimeo: You’ll find the player loads very fast. And it has a feature where your videos can be played only on domains you allow.

When it comes to storage space and bandwidth, Vimeo is very generous. But, as a past user, I found I didn’t really consume so much resources. In fact, my uploads added upto less than 50 GB.
For commercial use, you have to at least take Vimeo’s $240/year plan (which after 20% renewal discount works to $192/year).

Now, compare it with Publitio.

It is also very fast. And also has the domain-level protection.

And given the AppSumo deal, you can get 400 GB storage/2 TB bandwidth per month at a one-time price of $196 (in the same ball park as Vimeo’s $192 for Vimeo Pro).

So, Publitio is a better choice than Vimeo for our purpose.

Yes, Vimeo (& YouTube of course) are mature and stable services and will be around for years.

Publitio is new. And there is a chance they might not be around in a few years.

But can we hold that against a start-up?

At this price?

Seriously??

So, I got 3 codes. And plan to keep a backup of all videos just in case.

But I’m rooting for Publitio.

P.S. I also compared Publitio with vooPlayer (unique features, but expensive storage) and VdoCipher (best security features of them all, but expensive storage & bandwidth).

P.P.S. Why did I write this review? While test driving Publitio, Nemanja (who mans the support) was patient and super helpful with all my queries. So I had to do this out of gratitude.