Have you been experiencing abnormally slow speeds on YouTube lately? Are you wondering what went wrong? Perhaps there's something wrong with your computer or internet?
The problem actually lies more in the inherent nature of YouTube and videos.
Nevermind the fact that Google bought YouTube. Even an internet powerhouse like Google can't cope with YouTube's problems forever.
You see, YouTube is serving media files. Media files, specifically music and video, are the largest types of files. Videos are, by themselves, the single largest in most cases.
Every time you send a request to YouTube, the YouTube servers have to upload the file to you while you are downloading it. YouTube's servers end up doing this millions of times simultaneously.
Couple this with the fact that YouTube is ranked as one of the top 10-20 websites on the internet according to Alexa rankings. That is...top 10-20 most trafficked sites! When you're serving the largest types of files and you're one of the most trafficked websites, problems begin to arise.
Even though Google runs the servers, the Google search engine primarily serves text web pages. After all, how many images or videos have you seen hosted on Google? YouTube is a different story. The reason it can be so slow sometimes is because it servers more video than it does text!
Not only that, but the embedding of YouTube videos outside of YouTube itself causes huge bandwidth issues. These embedded videos do not show advertisements, thus YouTube does not make a single penny off hosting the videos on the other pages! This lack of profit makes it more difficult to maintain server costs.
Also, just because one video is loading slow does not mean that the entire YouTube website is slowing down. Each video on YouTube is served by a different server. If every single video you try to watch is loading slow on YouTube, then there's either a massive slow down on all the YouTube servers or it might just actually be your computer/internet connection!
So next time you experience a massive YouTube slowdown, don't panic too quickly! First, ask your friends if they are experiencing a similar problem. If they are, you can credit the problem to the inherent nature of YouTube and videos on the web. If they are not, then make sure you do some computer maintenance like virus and spyware scans!
