Course Hosting Platform: What It Is & How to Choose One

You've built the knowledge. You've mapped out the curriculum. You've maybe even recorded a few lessons. Now comes the question no one told you would be this consequential: where does your course actually live?

The answer isn't just a technical detail. The platform you choose to host your course determines how reliably students can access it, how securely your content is protected, how your brand shows up in the world, and how much control you retain over everything you've built. Get it wrong, and you're dealing with slow video loads, content security risks, and a URL that ends in someone else's name. Get it right, and your course business runs quietly in the background, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, while you focus on teaching.

This guide breaks down exactly what a course hosting platform is, what separates a strong one from a weak one, and how to evaluate your options before you commit.

What does "course hosting" actually mean?

Before we get into features and comparisons, it's worth getting clear on what hosting means, because the word is often used loosely in ways that obscure the real decision you're making.

When you host a course, you're choosing a technical infrastructure to store and deliver your content: your videos, your PDFs, your quizzes, your lesson pages. That infrastructure determines load times, uptime, content security, and scalability. It's the foundation everything else is built on.

A course hosting platform is a service that manages this infrastructure on your behalf. You upload your content. The platform stores it, compresses it, distributes it through a delivery network, and makes it accessible to your students anywhere in the world. The best platforms also layer on the tools you need to actually run a course business: enrollment management, payment processing, custom branding, analytics, and student communication.

Hosting vs. marketplace: a distinction worth understanding

Here's a distinction that changes everything about your business model.

A course hosting platform gives you control. You set your own pricing, own your student list, and build under your brand. The platform provides the infrastructure. You run the business.

A course marketplace, such as Udemy or Skillshare, is different. The marketplace hosts your content, but they also control the pricing, take a significant cut of your revenue, often 30–50%, and own the relationship with your audience. Your students are their students. Your traffic belongs to their platform.

The shift away from marketplaces is a growing trend among serious creators, and for good reason. When you learn what you can build and sell on Teachable, the picture becomes clear. Building under your own brand, on a platform you control, is the sustainable path.

Why hosting infrastructure matters more than most creators realize

Here is the thing about infrastructure: it's invisible until it breaks. When it breaks, whether that is a video that will not load, a checkout page that is down during a launch, or a student who cannot access the course they just bought, you feel it directly in your revenue and reputation.

The global online learning market continues to grow rapidly, with EDUCAUSE and major research organizations tracking sustained enrollment growth across every segment of online education. More creators are entering the space every year. That raises the bar. Students have options, and a technically unreliable experience sends them elsewhere.

The 6 hosting factors that define your course business

So what does strong hosting infrastructure actually look like? Six factors matter most.

1. Video hosting and delivery infrastructure

Video is the heart of most online courses, and it's the heaviest technical lift. A five-minute HD video can easily be several gigabytes. Multiply that across a full curriculum, add students in multiple countries streaming simultaneously, and you understand why video delivery is where platforms either earn trust or lose it.

What you want in a video hosting setup:

• Dedicated video infrastructure, not just file storage but a purpose-built video delivery system
• Adaptive bitrate streaming, where the player adjusts quality in real time based on the student's connection speed
• A content delivery network (CDN), with servers distributed globally so the video loads quickly whether the student is in São Paulo, Seoul, or Seattle
• Large file support, since full-length courses require generous upload limits

Video delivery quality directly affects your completion rates. Students who experience buffering or failed loads do not persist through the course. They abandon it.

2. Uptime and reliability

Uptime is the percentage of time your course platform is up and available. It sounds abstract until you realize that a platform with 99% uptime is down for roughly 87 hours per year. For a creator running live cohorts or a course that is actively generating revenue, 87 hours of downtime is a serious problem.

Look for platforms with published uptime commitments of 99.9% or higher, along with transparent incident history.

3. Security and data protection

Your course content has commercial value. It is your intellectual property and your revenue source. Your students' personal and payment information is also on the line. Security is not optional.

The markers to look for:

• SSL/HTTPS on all pages, automatic and not a manual add-on
• Content protection controls, including the ability to disable file downloads where you want to protect your intellectual property
• Compliance with major data regulations. GDPR compliance matters if you have any EU students, and most serious creators do
• Third-party security audits. Platforms that undergo independent auditing are much more trustworthy than those that only self-certify

4. Custom domain and brand ownership

Your course school lives at a URL. That URL tells your audience a lot about you. A school at yourname.teachable.com communicates something different from courses.yourname.com. Only one of those options is building long-term brand equity.

A strong course hosting platform gives you a custom domain on any paid plan, with no subdomain that includes their brand name. The DNS setup should be well documented, and the platform should automatically provision SSL for custom domains so your students see the padlock, not a security warning.

5. Content types and file format support

Hosting video is table stakes. The best platforms also support a full range of educational content formats, because diverse content types are not just about preference. They are about learning science.

Research on online learning consistently shows that courses using multiple modalities, including video, text, audio, quizzes, and downloadable resources, produce better learning outcomes than single-format courses. Your hosting platform needs to support the full curriculum you want to build.

Look for support across:

• Video, including multiple formats and large file sizes
• PDF and document files, with in-browser viewing so students do not need to download
• Audio files for podcast-style lessons or supplementary listening
• Quizzes and assessments
• Downloadable resources such as worksheets, templates, and bonus materials
• Third-party embeds for live sessions, slide decks, and interactive tools

6. Access control and content protection

Hosting your content is only valuable if you can control who sees it and under what terms. Strong hosting platforms give you granular control over content access:

• Enrollment-based access, where content is only visible to enrolled and often paid students
• Drip scheduling, which releases lessons on a set schedule instead of all at once
• Download controls, including the ability to disable the download link on individual files
• Preview content, allowing you to designate specific lessons as free previews to attract new students without giving away your curriculum

The course hosting evaluation checklist

Before committing to a platform, run it through these questions:

• Does it use dedicated video infrastructure rather than generic file storage?
• What is the published uptime SLA? Is incident history transparent?
• Does it automatically provision SSL for your custom domain?
• Is it GDPR compliant? Has it passed any third-party security audits?
• Can I connect a custom domain on the plan I am considering?
• What is the maximum file size for uploads?
• Does it support the content types I need, including video, PDF, audio, and quizzes?
• Can I control which files students can download?
• Does it integrate with the business tools I already use?

If a platform cannot clearly answer any of those questions, that is your answer.

For a deeper look at how to evaluate your options overall, our guide to choosing an online course platform walks through the full decision framework, from pricing to marketing tools to payment processing.

How Teachable handles course hosting

Teachable is built as a course hosting and selling platform, and the technical infrastructure behind it reflects that purpose. Here is what is running under the hood.

AWS infrastructure

Teachable runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the most reliable cloud infrastructure providers in the world. AWS powers a significant portion of the internet's most critical applications and provides enterprise-grade reliability, redundancy, and global availability.

Built-in video hosting via Hotmart Video Player

Video content on Teachable is hosted and delivered through the Hotmart Video Player, a purpose-built video delivery system that handles compression and adaptive delivery automatically. When you upload a video, the player generates multiple resolution versions ranging from 240p through 1080p. Playback quality adjusts to each student's connection speed without any manual encoding on your end.

Teachable supports video file uploads up to 20GB, which provides enough headroom for high-quality, full-length lessons across a multi-module curriculum. You can also add subtitles and automatic translations directly within the player.

If you prefer to use external video sources, Teachable also supports embedding Vimeo and YouTube videos via a custom code block, which is useful if you are hosting supplementary or preview content elsewhere.

99.99% uptime

Teachable strives for and generally exceeds 99.99% uptime for both instructors and students. Your school runs continuously. There is no office-hours model where your courses are unavailable. Students can access content at 2 a.m. in Berlin as reliably as noon in New York.

Automatic SSL for every school

Every Teachable school, including those using custom domains, receives automatic SSL certificate provisioning. Your school is HTTPS by default. There is no manual setup, no third-party SSL service to purchase, and no renewal to remember.

This also matters for SEO. Google factors HTTPS into search rankings, which means a securely hosted school performs better in organic search than an equivalent HTTP site.

SOC 2 Type II certification

Teachable holds a SOC 2 Type II accreditation, which is a rigorous third-party security audit that reviews not just a single snapshot of security controls but their effectiveness over time. SOC 2 Type II covers how customer data is stored, accessed, monitored, and protected across Teachable's infrastructure, software, policies, and operations. It is the standard security benchmark for serious SaaS platforms.

GDPR compliance

Teachable is committed to full compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which governs the rights of EU citizens over their personal data. If any of your students are based in Europe, and for most creators some will be, GDPR compliance is not optional. Teachable handles the compliance framework so you do not have to build it yourself.

Content protection controls

Videos on Teachable include enhanced piracy protection built in. You can also control download availability at the individual file level and toggle off the download link for specific lessons if you want students to consume content within the platform only. Combined with enrollment-based access control, your content is accessible to paying students and protected from everyone else.

Custom domains with up to 10 domain options

On any paid Teachable plan, you can connect a custom domain to your school. You can maintain up to 10 domains in your account, which is useful if you are running multiple brands or testing domain strategies, with one set as your primary. Teachable provides full documentation for DNS configuration, including guidance for schools using Cloudflare for domain management.

The result is simple. Your school lives at courses.yourname.com, not at a URL that promotes someone else's platform.

A full range of supported content types

Teachable's hosting supports everything that goes into a complete course:

• Video, uploaded directly or via Google Drive and Dropbox integrations, with files up to 20GB
• Audio, using streamable audio blocks that can also be made downloadable
• PDF, with an in-browser PDF viewer and optional download toggle
• Images, including full support for .jpg and .png across all school pages
• Quizzes and assessments built into the lesson structure
• Subtitles and captions through uploaded .srt files
• Downloadable resources, where any file type can be attached as a downloadable even if it cannot be embedded
• Third-party embeds including YouTube, Vimeo, Zoom, and other services via custom HTML blocks

If you are ready to take the next step, here is how to create an online course, from curriculum design through uploading and launching. When you are ready to go live, publishing your first course on Teachable walks through the final setup steps.

Common course hosting mistakes to avoid

Even with the right platform, a few hosting mistakes are common enough to flag upfront.

Using a marketplace when you need a platform. If you want to build a real business instead of just earning supplemental income, you need ownership over your audience and brand. Marketplaces trade control for traffic, and it is usually a bad trade.

Ignoring video file quality: Uploading compressed or low-resolution video to save upload time creates a permanently inferior experience for students. Record and upload at the highest quality your budget allows. Let the platform handle compression for delivery.

Skipping the custom domain: Your default platform URL is fine for testing, but it is not fine for launch. A custom domain costs under $20 per year and dramatically improves how your school is perceived. Set it up before you go live.

Forgetting about mobile: Most of your students will access your course on a phone or tablet at some point. A good course hosting platform delivers content responsively across screen sizes. Test on mobile before you launch.

Not checking what happens to your content if you leave. Before you commit to a platform, understand the export and migration policy. You should own your content and be able to take it with you.

The bottom line

Your course is only as good as its delivery. The most thoughtfully designed curriculum in the world falls flat if students hit buffering video, get a browser security warning, or can't find your school because you're buried under someone else's branding.

Choosing the right course hosting platform isn't a technical decision you make once and forget. It's a foundational business decision that determines how reliably you can serve your students, how securely your content is protected, and how much of your business you actually own.

The good news: when the infrastructure is solid, you stop thinking about it. You create. Students learn. The business grows.

Over 150,000 creators have built their course businesses on Teachable and we havecontributed to over $10 billion in creator earnings globally. Start your free trial and see what it means to host your course on infrastructure built to last.