Content marketing is one of the most cost-effective forms of “advertising” available to startups.  Through story telling, businesses can turn visitors into a fans, fans into a buyers, and buyers into life-long customers / brand advocates.  And for many, video is the preferred medium through which to deliver this story. Because hosting videos is an unnecessary drain to your server, standard practice is to host your videos on a third party platform. But which platform should your startup use?   We reached out to our friends at YEC to share a few of their favorites.  They’re below.  Enjoy.

The Top 8 Video Hosting Platforms for Startups

(Tweet this article) – Dave Nevogt, co-founder at Hubstaff.com

2. Wistia

Without a doubt, Wistia is the best solution for hosting videos. Its player is easily customizable and also helps considerably with conversion. – Patrick Vlaskovits, Author at The Lean Entrepreneur

3. JWPlayer

– Jennifer Donogh, President at Ovaleye, LLC

4. Vimeo

The benefits of Vimeo are a lot like YouTube, but the brand is a bit more professional and artsy. – Brennan White, CEO at Watchtower

5. Kaltura

Kaltura is a great option that features transcoding, syndication and top-tier hosting. – Andrew Schrage, Co-Owner at Money Crashers Personal Finance

6. YouTube

Besides being low-cost, YouTube’s built-in search and sharing tools make it better than anything else available. You want your company’s content to be easy to find and easily shareable. – Sarah Schupp, CEO & Founder at UniversityParent

7. Vidyard

Vidyard is by far the best option. Not only does it allow you to host videos, but also it provides great tracking on its dashboard that can help you understand which videos are effective and what people enjoy watching. But the real key is its ability to integrate with services including Salesforce and Hubspot. You can take video from being something cool on your site to a tool that can track who watches it and view that right in Salesforce or Hubspot, along with all the data about that lead. It is a total game changer. – Andrew Angus, Founder and CEO at Switch Video

8. CloudFront

– Bhavin Parikh, CEO at Magoosh Inc