The hosting issue is orthogonal: register a domain ($4-$15), rent a Linux VPS ($5/month), install Apache. Then, learn how to use the video embed tag (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/vi...). Use ffmpeg to convert the videos to the format and size you want them in, upload with rsync. That's it.
You're thinking like an engineer. To a non-technical person, that's a lot. I'd even go so far as to say it's prohibitively difficult for anyone outside of our profession.
I'll even say that it's going to be difficult even for folks within our profession. Finding someone who can launch and configure Apache properly (i.e. in a way which won't get it quickly reconfigured to serve porn or illegal files), not to mention keeping everything up to date, is getting more and more rare.
I mentioned the tradeoff involved in a later comment.
The difference between a technical person and a non-technical person is that the former has decided to learn what is needed to do what he or she wants to do. It’s not a secret club. All the information is on the internet.
I never went to Apache engineering school, I have been running my own sites and others for many years, and no one has taken anything over for porn. There is a lot to learn, but it’s not like going to medical school. Anyone can do it who is motivated.
That knowledge is an entire career's worth of knowledge. Sure, almost anyone could pick it up, but it's more cost effective for them to rely on others to do it for them.
For a musician, the learning and upkeep is a lot of time that would better be spent creating; making a living.
I don’t disagree. But that’s the tradeoff I’m talking about. Letting others do it for you means giving up control; the limiting case is being abused by YouTube. If you have money, you can hire people to do this for you. But most people can’t afford to hire their own “engineers”. These are the choices.
>The difference between a technical person and a non-technical person is that the former has decided to learn what is needed to do what he or she wants to do
that feels overly reductive and conductive to the majority of trades and hobbies today. If a court ruled based on this concept, antitrust wouldn't exist as a concept.
"the difference between an artistic person and a non-artistic person is that the former decided to learn what is needed. All the information is on the internet"
"the difference between a Spanish speaking person and a non-spanish speaking person is that the former decided to learn what is needed. All the information is on the internet"
"the difference between a guitar player and a non-guitar player is that the former decided to learn what is needed. All the information is on the internet"
The more common case of this is :
1. most people aren't "motivated" enough to learn a new skill, especially one that is only indirect to their goal. I COULD learn HTML and host my own website, or I pay some template site $30 and get my portfolio up. Even back in my college days, $30 was worth an a few hours of my work time. well worth a few hours to let someone else keep my portfolio up. Paid off well in hindsight.
2. There isn't time to lean every sub step to your goal, which is why various scaffolding exists. I didn't need to understand how my OS, web browser, nor web server worked in order to send this comment. And I wouldn't send it if it wasn't convenient to do so.
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.
