For most businesses, the best web hosting for video streaming is not a web hosting plan at all. It is a video platform that encodes your files into several qualities, stores them and delivers them through a content delivery network (CDN), while your website runs on ordinary hosting and embeds the player. Ordinary shared hosting is not built for serving large video files to many viewers. Running your own streaming servers makes sense only at scale or for special requirements. This is Tremhost’s own blog, and Tremhost is one of the providers listed; it does not sell a video streaming platform.
What makes video hosting good for a streaming site?
Encoding and adaptive bitrate
What to check: whether the service converts uploads into several resolutions and serves them with adaptive streaming (HLS or DASH), and whether encoding is charged.
Why it matters: adaptive streaming lets the player switch quality as a viewer’s connection changes, so a viewer on mobile data gets a lower resolution instead of endless buffering. That matters a great deal where connections vary.
Delivery network near your audience
What to check: where the CDN has locations, and whether delivery costs differ by region.
Why it matters: video is heavy. Serving it from a location near viewers reduces start-up time and buffering.
Pricing model
What to check: whether you pay per GB delivered, per minute delivered or a flat plan, plus storage and any minimum charge.
Why it matters: per-minute and per-GB pricing scale very differently with video quality and audience size. Model your own numbers before choosing.
Live streaming
What to check: support for live input (for example RTMP or SRT from OBS or a hardware encoder), recording of live streams, and latency.
Why it matters: church services, school events and webinars need live input and a recording afterwards; on-demand libraries do not.
Player, security and analytics
What to check: an embeddable player, signed URLs or domain restrictions, DRM if your content requires it, and viewing statistics.
Why it matters: paid courses and premium content need protection from hot-linking and casual downloading.
Why not ordinary web hosting?
Shared hosting has bandwidth limits and fair-use terms, does not transcode, and serves every viewer from one server. A handful of short clips may be fine, but a library or a live audience will run into limits quickly. Keep the website on web hosting and the video on a video platform. If you are new to hosting terms, read what web hosting is.
A shortlist of video hosting options
Listed in alphabetical order, not ranked. Figures come from each provider’s own page as listed on 5 November 2026 and can change. We have not tested these services.
Bunny Stream (bunny.net)
Its Bunny Stream pricing page, as listed on 5 November 2026, lists free transcoding, storage from $0.01 per GB, delivery from $0.005 per GB, a free player, a $1 monthly minimum, and the option to switch CDN regions on or off to control costs. Per-region delivery rates are not listed on that page.
Cloudflare Stream
Its Stream pricing page, as listed on 5 November 2026, charges $5 a month for each 1,000 minutes of video stored and $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered, with encoding and ingress free and no separate bandwidth fees. Live input recordings count towards storage.
Mux
Its pricing overview, as listed on 5 November 2026, charges for input, storage and delivery per minute, with basic-quality input free and 100,000 free delivery minutes each month. It offers pay-as-you-go, prepaid plans and custom contracts.
Tremhost
Tremhost does not sell a video streaming platform or streaming servers. What it offers that is relevant: web hosting from $30 a year for the website that embeds your player; S3-compatible object storage from $8 a month for keeping master files and backups; and dedicated servers if you plan to run your own streaming software. Payment is in US dollars by EcoCash, InnBucks, ZimSwitch, Omari, Visa, Mastercard or cryptocurrency, and support runs Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 17:00 CAT.
What does streaming cost? A worked example
Using Cloudflare Stream’s published rates: a church streams a one-hour service each week and 200 people watch an average of 45 minutes. That is 9,000 minutes delivered a week, about 39,000 a month, or roughly $39 a month in delivery. Keeping 52 one-hour recordings (3,120 minutes) needs 4,000 minutes of storage capacity, which is $20 a month. On per-GB pricing, the same audience costs depend on the resolution: higher quality means more GB per minute. Run your own figures through each provider’s calculator before deciding.
How to set up a video site, step by step
- Host the website on ordinary web hosting with WordPress or your own site, and register a domain.
- Open an account with a video platform and upload a test video. Check that it produces several quality levels.
- Restrict playback to your domain, or use signed URLs for paid content.
- Embed the player on your pages and test on a slow mobile connection as well as office broadband.
- For live events, connect OBS or your encoder to the platform’s live input, run a private test stream, and confirm the recording appears afterwards.
- Keep master files somewhere other than the platform, such as object storage, so you can move providers later.
- Watch usage in the platform’s dashboard for the first month and compare it with your estimate.
Which should you choose? A decision guide
- A small business with a few product videos: a free video platform embed or a low-minimum service is enough. Do not pay for streaming servers.
- A course creator selling video lessons: choose a platform with signed URLs or domain restrictions, and compare per-minute versus per-GB costs for your expected views.
- A church, school or club streaming events live: look for live input from OBS or a hardware encoder, automatic recording and simple embedding.
- A developer building a video app: a video API with webhooks and per-minute pricing gives you encoding, storage and delivery without running servers.
- A broadcaster with a large, steady audience: self-hosted streaming on dedicated servers plus a CDN may be cheaper at scale, but needs engineers to run it.
Frequently asked questions
Can I host videos on shared hosting?
A few short clips, yes. A video library or live audience, no: shared hosting has bandwidth and fair-use limits and does not transcode or use adaptive streaming.
Do I need a CDN for video?
For any real audience, yes. A CDN serves video from locations closer to viewers, which reduces buffering. Video platforms usually include delivery through a CDN.
What is the difference between per-GB and per-minute pricing?
Per-GB pricing charges for data transferred, so higher resolutions cost more. Per-minute pricing charges for viewing time regardless of quality. Which is cheaper depends on your audience and resolution.
Next step
Estimate your monthly minutes watched, your library size and whether you need live streaming, then price two or three video platforms with those numbers. Host the website itself on ordinary web hosting and embed the player.
