The storage cluster, from the top
Cloud storage holds bytes.
Video hosting moves them to a viewer.
That is the whole difference, and it is measurable on three axes: what a plan lets out of the building each day, what a viewer actually sees when they press play, and what happens to your files when the money stops. Cloud storage is the right tool for most of an editor's life. It is the wrong tool at exactly one moment, and that moment is the one a client sees.
Video hosting for filmmakers · 5 GB free · Paid plans from USD 9/month
Updated September 2026
One sentence, then the proof
Storage is priced to hold bytes,
hosting is priced to move them.
Every confusing thing about this decision comes from the overlap. Storage products preview video, so they look like hosts. Hosts store files, so they look like storage. The way to tell them apart is to read the meters, because a product meters the thing it is actually selling. A storage plan meters what leaves it. A hosting plan meters what it holds and gives the leaving away.
What a storage product sells
Durability and sync. Bytes stay identical, appear on every machine you own, roll back to yesterday, and share with people who have the software or the patience. Delivery to a stranger is a courtesy feature bolted to the side, and it is metered like one.
What a hosting product sells
Readiness to play. One URL, no account, no download, a picture that starts within a second on a phone in a parking lot. The file is stored so that it can be served; storage is the cost of the product, not the product.
Why editors get caught
Because the storage link works. It works for the assistant, for the producer, for the colorist. Then it goes to the client who is not technical, on the device you did not test, and the courtesy feature turns out to have a resolution ceiling, a duration cap and a daily budget.
The line, stated once
The moment a file has to be watched by a client, on a phone, without an account, at the quality it was graded, storage is the wrong tool. Every other moment in an editor's week, it is the right one.
Axis one: delivery
Cloud storage meters what leaves,
and it publishes the number.
This is the cleanest proof on the page that storage is not delivery. Dropbox publishes a daily traffic budget on shared links, and it scales with the plan the way a delivery product’s bill scales with an audience. Nothing about durability changes between these rows. Only the amount you are allowed to send.
Dropbox figures are quoted from its shared-link limits page, fetched 9 September 2026. No Dropbox or Google price appears anywhere on this page: both pricing pages served Canadian dollar figures to that fetch, and their US dollar prices were not verified, so the argument here is built on limits, which are currency free. uncompressed.io figures come from its pricing page and Terms, and from the uploader's own published limit.
Put a working day against those numbers. A 20 GB budget is one 4K export sent to one person, or a 10 GB cut watched twice. It is not a bad number for a free tier. It is simply a delivery budget, which is the point: a product that did not care about delivery would have no reason to count it. The paid rows are generous enough that most editors will never touch them, and that is worth saying plainly, because the argument here is not that Dropbox is stingy. The argument is that delivery is a metered resource in a storage product and an unmetered one in a hosting product, and that difference is structural, not promotional.
On this side the Terms state that storage is the only meter and there are no bandwidth caps. Views, viewers and uploads are not counted on any plan, including the free one. What is counted is how many bytes you keep, which is the honest meter for a product whose whole job is to have the file ready.
Axis two: playback
A storage product previews video as a courtesy,
not as a deliverable.
Dropbox is the clearest example because it documents its preview behaviour in public. Read the ladder below as what it is: a set of renditions chosen for a viewer, with a ceiling that moves when you pay, a clock that stops the stream, and a file size above which nothing previews at all.
Dropbox preview ceilings, streaming duration limits and the 100 GB preview file size ceiling are quoted from its video and audio FAQ and its file types that preview page, both fetched 9 September 2026. Its in-player quality selector offers Auto, 360p, 480p, 720p and 1080p. On this side, browser playback covers H.264, HEVC and AV1; ProRes and DNxHR are hosted for client download rather than streamed, and 8K plays when the viewer's hardware decodes it.
What the ladder proves, and what it does not
It proves that what the viewer receives is a rendition selected by the platform, and that the ceiling of that rendition is a function of the account paying the bill. It does not prove that your master was re-encoded, and this page does not claim it was: no official Dropbox or Google page says either company re-encodes or transcodes a master, so the resolution ladder is the evidence available and the argument stops there. Your file comes back down the way it went up. It is the watching that is negotiated.
The same discipline applies to Google Drive. The widely repeated claim that Drive caps video preview at 1080p could not be confirmed on any official Google page, so it is absent from this page entirely. What Google does publish is worth more anyway, and it is in the next section.
Axis three: retention
What happens the month the money
stops arriving.
This is the axis nobody checks before uploading, and it is the one that separates a place you park a file from a place you trust with a negative. All three sentences below are the companies’ own words, on their own help pages.
Every cell is quoted or paraphrased from the company's own help page, all fetched 9 September 2026: Vimeo's lapsing-to-Basic FAQ, Google's over-quota page and Dropbox's individual plan downgrade page. Google's clause is a might, not a guarantee, and is quoted as such. This table has no column for uncompressed.io because no comparable published retention window exists to quote, and inventing one to win a row would be the kind of claim this page refuses elsewhere.
The Vimeo row is the sharpest illustration of the whole page, and it is worth reading twice. A host’s product is the stream. When the plan lapses, the stream survives in HD and SD and the source file is deleted at 60 days. That is not a scandal; it is a company being explicit about which asset it considers yours to hold and which it considers its to serve. But it is exactly why a delivery platform is not an archive, in the same way that a sync folder is not a delivery platform.
The storage rows point the other way and land in the same place. Google will let files sit over quota for two years and then reserves the right to delete across Gmail, Drive and Photos. Dropbox states plainly that it may delete files you own to bring an over-limit account back under. Neither is unreasonable. Both mean the same thing for an editor: the copy that matters lives on hardware you own, and everything in a browser is a working copy with a policy attached to it.
The honest part
Cloud storage is the right tool for most
of an editor's life.
If this page only argued for hosting it would be useless, because most of the files you touch this week should never go near a video host. Here is where a sync folder wins outright, and the reader who recognises their own week in this list should stay where they are.
Project folders
Timelines, LUTs, graphics, contracts, invoices, the deck the agency keeps editing. Versioned, synced, searchable, open on two machines at once. A video host has no useful opinion about any of this.
Camera negatives and archive
The off-site copy of what a reshoot cannot replace. Google Drive takes files up to 5 TB and up to 750 GB of upload in 24 hours, which is a perfectly sane path for a finished project folder that nobody will stream.
Round-tripping with an assistant
Push the selects, they push back a rough assembly, you both work from the same folder tree. Sync is the entire feature and no hosting product does it better.
A shared drive for a small team
Everyone on one folder structure, permissions per folder, a recycle bin when someone deletes the wrong thing. This is the job these products were designed around.
Anything nobody streams
If a file exists to be safe rather than to be watched, hosting is the wrong rate card. Readiness to play is what you are paying for, and a negative is never ready to play.
Handing over the raw materials
The client who wants the project files, the stock licences and the source graphics is asking for a folder, not a player. Send a folder.
The reverse is just as true and is worth stating with the same force: a video host is a bad and expensive place to warehouse a camera negative. Hosting is priced for readiness, and readiness costs money every month whether anyone presses play or not. Fourteen terabytes of rushes that will not be opened this year do not need to be ready. They need to be cheap, redundant and boring. That is a RAID and an archive tier, and this site says the same thing on its own hot versus cold storage page, where the recommendation is to keep the rushes on local disks and send only the master and the selects off-site.
Where the line falls
Four conditions, and when all four are true,
the tool has to change.
It has to be watched, not downloaded
A download is a decision the viewer has to make and a wait they have to accept. If the file has to play the moment the link opens, the courtesy preview is now the deliverable, and its ceiling is now your ceiling.
By someone without an account
Clients, festival programmers, brand managers, the executive who was forwarded the link. Every account wall between them and the picture is a place the review stops.
On a phone, on a bad connection
This is where a resolution ladder and a viewing-environment adjustment do exactly what they were built to do, and where nothing guarantees that the picture being judged is the picture you graded.
At the quality it was graded
The reason this matters is not pride. It is that a grade note, a noise note or a banding note from a viewer watching a downgraded rendition costs a round trip that never needed to happen.
When all four are true, the fix is not a bigger storage plan. A bigger storage plan raises the daily traffic budget and the preview ceiling, which helps, but it does not change what the product is doing: choosing a rendition for your viewer. The alternative is a player that does not choose. Here the player streams the exact bytes uploaded, with no transcode anywhere, so a 150 Mbps export is watched at 150 Mbps. Browser playback covers H.264, HEVC and AV1. ProRes and DNxHR are hosted for client download rather than streamed, because browsers do not decode them, and 8K plays when the viewer’s own hardware decodes it.
uncompressed.io plans in US dollars, from its pricing page. Cold storage is available on Max and Studio only. Starter carries 5 GB of hot storage and plays one film at a time. The Vault, the protected macOS review path, is not a plan: access to it is included on every plan, including Starter, and what the paid plans change is storage and included team seats. The Terms state that storage is the only meter and that there are no bandwidth caps, so views, viewers and uploads are not counted on any plan, including the free one.
The verdict
Two tools: one for the work,
one for the deliverable.
Nobody has to choose. The sync folder keeps doing the job it is good at, which is most of the week, and the negatives stay on hardware you own with an off-site copy in whichever storage product you already pay for. What changes is the single file that leaves your building with your name on it. That file wants no daily budget, no resolution ladder, no clock that stops the stream at thirty minutes, and no clause about what happens to source files sixty days after a plan lapses. It wants to play, at the bitrate you exported, the first time a stranger clicks it.
If you are still unsure which side of the line your week falls on, use the cheapest test there is: name the person who has to watch the file, and ask whether they have an account, a fast connection and a reason to be patient. If the answer is yes to all three, keep the link you already have. If it is no to any of them, you are looking for a host, and the rest of this cluster is about picking one.
Questions
Frequently asked
What is the actual difference between cloud storage and video hosting?
Cloud storage is engineered and priced to hold bytes safely and sync them between machines you control. Video hosting is engineered and priced to move those bytes to a viewer who has no account, no software and no patience. The two overlap enough to be confusing: storage products preview video, and hosts store files. The difference shows up in the meters. A storage plan counts what leaves it, and Dropbox publishes the number: 20 GB a day on Basic, 1 TB a day on Plus through Business, 4 TB a day on Advanced and above. A hosting plan counts what it holds and sells you the delivery.
Does Dropbox or Google Drive re-encode my master?
No official page from either company says so, so this page does not claim it. What Dropbox does publish is a preview resolution ladder: Basic users preview up to 1080p, paid customers up to 2160p, through steps at 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p and 1440p, and Dropbox states that it adjusts the resolution based on your viewing environment. Read that for what it is: the preview is a rendition chosen for the viewer, not a promise about the file. The file you uploaded is still the file you downloaded.
Is a shared link good enough for a client review?
It depends on the client and the file. If they are technical, patient and on a desktop, a link to a download is fine and always has been. If they are on a phone, in a meeting, or judging a grade, the two things a storage link does not give you are a guaranteed playback resolution and a guaranteed play at all: Dropbox states that a video file must be smaller than 100 GB for the preview to work, and it stops streaming after the first 30 minutes on Basic, two hours on Plus, Family and Professional, and four hours on Standard, Advanced and Enterprise.
Should I move my camera negatives to a video host?
No. A host is priced for readiness to play, and a negative never plays. Keep camera originals on local disks and a RAID, with an off-site copy in a storage product or an archive tier. Google Drive accepts files up to 5 TB and up to 750 GB of upload in 24 hours, which is a perfectly reasonable off-site path for a finished project folder. Hosting earns its rate on the one file people click, not on the twelve terabytes nobody will open this year.
What happens to my files if I stop paying?
It depends entirely on which kind of product you stopped paying. Vimeo states that if a paid membership lapses to Basic, any source files stored on Vimeo will be deleted after 60 days and cannot be recovered, while the HD and SD versions remain available. Google states that if you are over your storage quota for 2 years, it might delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos. Dropbox states that if an account remains over the limit, Dropbox may delete files you own to bring the account below the storage limit. Read the sentence for the product you are about to trust with a negative.
Can a host handle the file sizes an editor actually works with?
Uploads here take up to 5 TB per file, subject to your available storage, and the player streams the exact bytes uploaded with no transcode anywhere. Browser playback covers H.264, HEVC and AV1. ProRes and DNxHR are hosted for client download rather than streamed, because browsers do not decode them, and 8K plays when the viewer's own hardware decodes it.
So which one do I buy?
Both, and for different jobs. Keep the sync folder for project files, round trips with an assistant and the shared drive your team already lives in. Add hosting for the deliverable: the moment a file has to be watched by a client, on a phone, without an account, at the quality it was graded, a storage product is doing a job it was not built for and charging you in daily caps, preview ceilings or a first impression.
Keep the drive. Change where the client watches.
Storage for your negatives, hosting for the one file people click. The player here streams the exact bytes you uploaded, and no bandwidth is metered on any plan.
Sources
- 1.Dropbox Help Center: shared link traffic and download limits by plan (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 2.Dropbox Help Center: video and audio FAQ, preview resolution ceilings and streaming duration limits (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 3.Dropbox Help Center: file types that preview, 100 GB video preview ceiling (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 4.Dropbox Help Center: play video and audio, in-player quality selector (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 5.Dropbox Help Center: downgrading an individual plan, over-quota behaviour and deletion (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 6.Dropbox plans: Basic storage and transfer sizes by plan (fetched 9 September 2026; page served Canadian dollar pricing, so no Dropbox price is quoted here)
- 7.Google Drive Help: file size and type limits, up to 5 TB per file (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 8.Google Workspace: storage and upload limits, 750 GB per 24 hours (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 9.Google Drive Help: what happens when you run out of storage, including the two-year deletion clause (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 10.Google One plans: 15 GB included with every Google account (fetched 9 September 2026; page served Canadian dollar pricing, so no Google price is quoted here)
- 11.Vimeo Help Center: lapsing from a paid account to a Basic account, 60-day source file deletion (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 12.Vimeo Help Center: bandwidth on Vimeo, the 2 TB monthly threshold (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 13.uncompressed.io pricing: plans, hot and cold storage, no metered bandwidth
- 14.uncompressed.io Terms: storage is the only meter, no bandwidth caps