Looking For a Robust Media Solution on My Self-Hosted WP Site (Resolved)

I've been thoroughly enjoying my renewed journey into blogging and content creation via my self-hosted WordPress site. It's been awesome to use WordPress as my central hub, allowing me to create a space that truly represents me.

While I've managed to streamline most aspects of my content publishing, there's one hurdle that's been particularly frustrating—hosting my media. Right now, I'm using the WordPress app, and the native media management tools in WordPress. Unsurprisingly, this struggles with large file uploads, especially when it comes to videos. On-top of that, my hosting setup is basically a potato, and I'd prefer to keep the complexities of that minimized. The consequence of this is that my current media management process is cumbersome, unsustainable, and prone to failure.

Videos are particularly difficult, because I need to optimize them for the web using software on my desktop before uploading. This reduces bandwidth on my server and keeps me from filling the hard drive too soon. I would prefer that the solution would be capable of converting these for me after upload, much like services like Vimeo or YouTube do.

The Ideal Solution

What I'm looking for is a seamless way to upload videos directly from the WordPress app on my phone, but without actually hosting the videos on my site. Instead, I want these uploads to go to an external video hosting service that can handle these larger files, and also optimize them to be viewed on the web, thereby making the process easier and more reliable.

The integration should ideally allow me to:

• Upload audio, video, and photos easily on mobile, but ideally it would be do-able directly from the WordPress mobile app.
• Provide a smooth playback experience for my audience, without consuming bandwidth from my site
• Allow me to embed this media privately on my site, without requiring that they're also listed on an external service. I want my site to be the sole canonical source for this content.

Your Recommendations

If you've been in a similar situation or have expertise in this area, I'd love to hear your recommendations for services or plugins that might solve this problem. It would be a game-changer for me and allow me to further enrich the content I offer.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I look forward to hearing your solutions!

P.S. I’m open to both paid and free solutions, as long as they meet my needs effectively.

Update

I ended up going with Cloudinary. It's working fairly well for now. I'm not 100% sold on it yet, since it's kinda pricey and the automated sync doesn't work as well as I had hoped it would, but at least for now, I have a reliable place to host my videos.