Web hosting for videographers — Self-hosting the showreel is what makes it heavy

Every videographer's site has the same shape: a reel above everything else, a set of case studies underneath, a rate structure and an enquiry route. The reel is both the reason the site exists and the reason it is slow.

The technical distinction that matters is between hosting the file and embedding a player. Hosting it yourself means one bitrate, one origin and your bandwidth allowance. Embedding means somebody else's adaptive streaming and edge network, at the cost of their branding and their JavaScript on your page.

Neither is automatically correct. What follows is the arithmetic and the measurements that let you choose deliberately rather than by default, then how to make the page around the reel behave.

If the reel is above the fold, the poster frame is very likely your largest contentful paint element. Treat it as you would any hero image: correct dimensions, WebP conversion, no lazy loading on that one file. It is the frame people judge you on and it should arrive first.

Then set preload to none or metadata rather than auto, so the browser fetches the video only when someone asks for it. That single attribute frequently transforms a portfolio's numbers, because it stops several megabytes of video competing with the page's own rendering.

Case study pages are usually text plus stills, which the LiteSpeed cache answers without starting PHP. That is where the site's ordinary speed comes from, and it costs you nothing beyond uploading images at the size you display them.

For the enquiry side, outbound mail goes through MailChannels with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured on the domain, and daily backups with one-click restores sit underneath. There is no setup fee on any tier and hosting plans carry a 30-day money-back window.