I\'m diving into web development after ten years of desktop development and I ha

Question

I'm diving into web development after ten years of desktop development and I have an idea for a Rails website that will rely on users posting short videos (5 -15 mins) they've recorded. The website will be ad-supported and probably won't generate enough revenue to support hosting video based on how expensive I understand it to be, so the idea I had was to allow users to specify a link to the video they recorded and have posted on Youtube. This way, YouTube funds all the resources (storage, bandwidth, etc.) needed for the videos and I simply embed them in my website. My questions are...

Is it worth the poor design choice to separate the user's content service provider (in this case, YouTube) from my website in order to save the money it would cost me to host the videos myself?
Is there an inexpensive way for me to host the videos myself if the answer to my first question is "No!"?
If it's not a bad idea, do you see any other potential problems with this approach?
I apologize if this question is absurd in any way, I'm still getting familiar with the workings of web businesses. Thanks so much in advance for your wisdom, I'm going to continue researching my questions right now.

Explanation / Answer

It's definitely a good idea to offload as much hosting as you can to sites that you know will still be around long after your website is gone (or until you make enough money to host content yourself). Your real issue is: how do you make it transparent to your users?

I haven't really done any research into this myself but it might be worth seeing if you can embed the youtube video upload form on your own page so that the user never has to leave your site. Depending on the assumed computer competency of your users, making them create a youtube account, upload the video and then submit the link to your site is probably a bad idea.

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