Best Media Hosting of 2024

Compare Media Hosting Services

How We Chose the Best Media Hosts

Media hosting is more important than ever, as people expect webpages to be interesting with images, music, and videos. A web host should be up to the task of hosting all of your media.

From our database of hundreds of hosting plans, we selected hosts that offer the kind of bandwidth, storage, and computational power necessary to host a media-heavy website. Then we ranked them based on our thousands of expert and user reviews to come up with the top media hosting companies.

What Is Media Hosting?

The internet started out as a way to share documents — text documents. But, it wasn’t long before people wanted to share other forms of content including pictures, music, and video.

Today, a website is as likely to carry non-text media as it is likely to carry text content. If you’re planning a media-heavy website, you should choose your web host accordingly.

How to Choose a Media Host

With a media site, bandwidth and storage are the main considerations. You want the most transfers and storage for the least money possible. If you’re building your own network, you’ll want more control over your environment than shared plans will give you.

Cloud plans are ideal for media hosting. If the cloud is good enough for Netflix, it should be more than good enough for your media-heavy site. Keep these factors in mind as you choose a web host:

• Bandwidth requirements: Discount shared hosting providers will not scale well if you’re serving up a lot of videos or audio. A VPS plan is usually more appropriate, especially if it’s scalable to grow with your traffic. A cloud hosting plan lets you pay for less usage during off-peak times and to burst when you get a lot of traffic. With cloud hosting, you won’t pay for bandwidth or storage space that you don’t actually use.
• Storage requirements: You’ll want as much disk storage space as you can afford. Ideally, you would have unlimited storage, but a high-traffic, media-heavy site isn’t going to come cheap. While unlimited storage plans are ideal, you will want to ask the hosting provider what amount of storage they deem reasonable or you could run into issues as you grow.
• CMS compatibility: Some content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal, ZenPhoto, or MediaWiki work better with certain hosts, so this is worth keeping in mind when selecting your host.
• How much traffic you expect to receive on your site: Remember, you’ll want a plan that grows as your site and traffic grows.

Whether you plan on using one server or creating a content delivery network (CDN) — A CDN improves the performance of media streaming by locating servers that are geographically close to the user using sophisticated location algorithms. If you specialize in streaming media, you’ll want to build a CDN of your own or contract with a provider like Akamai that has experience with CDNs. A hosting provider with a CDN is cheaper than building your own network.