The most successful strategy is to have a professional transfer your VHS tapes to digital. By professional, I mean someone who has the facility and capability to precision bake tapes, clean them with the skill of a conservation expert, and be someone who has multiple high-end VHS machines that they maintain and clean before each tape is inserted. If they don't have multiple machines then that should disqualify them because in order to be profitable and priced competitively they have to do multiple tapes at once. Be skeptical of any business claiming to do transfers with only one videotape machine.
What else should they have?
Processing gear to upscale to HD resolution and a process to deinterlace the NTSC video to progressive scan. A great box to do that is called a Teranex. They should be able to convert your tape to a professional digital file and a highly compatible digital file which right now is a mpeg4 H.264 file that will play on any computer and be easily uploaded to a site like YouTube or Vimeo.
They should offer solutions for on-line storage/access and offer the file(s) on a USB drive. For all that, you should expect to pay between $12 and $25 per tape depending on how many tapes you have transferred and all of the services that are needed.
What else? The company should be a member of AMIA and possibly other media archive organizations. A good consultant can help you choose the best company.
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