The receiver needs a machine with a fixed public address that is on when you are streaming. Renting one costs somewhere between $5 and $12 a month.
Set a budget before you rent. Whichever provider you pick, add a budget or spending alert in its billing settings a little above the plan's monthly price, and use a hard spending cap or prepaid credit where it is offered. A budget is an alarm, not a fuse, but it stops a forgotten server, a bigger plan picked by mistake or traffic over the allowance from running away unnoticed. This goes double for a failover server, which sits idle and is easy to forget.
This page exists because provider prices and plan names change, and the advice that was right last year is often wrong today. It is kept up to date here rather than inside the dashboard, so it is always current no matter how old your dashboard is.
Prices below were checked on 11 September 2026.
Choose a 64-bit Intel/AMD or ARM server with a public IPv4 address.
The receiver supports both x86-64 and ARM64. The installer asks Docker which architecture it runs on and downloads the matching native image automatically. Hetzner's CAX plans, Oracle's Ampere shapes and Amazon's Graviton instances use ARM64 and are supported alongside Intel/AMD plans.
Older 32-bit ARM machines are not supported. The installer checks before downloading and stops with a clear message for unsupported architectures. Architecture alone is not a reason to reject a plan; check its memory, public IPv4 and traffic allowance.
Modest, and less than most people assume:
It does not need a fast processor. The receiver passes video through without re-encoding it, so the CPU sits almost idle. Paying for more cores buys nothing.
At 6 Mbit/s out, streaming 120 hours a month:
6 Mbit/s x 120 h = about 324 GB out per month
Double that if you push to two platforms at once. Add a little for SRT retransmits and call it 400 GB single / 800 GB dual.
Almost every plan includes far more than that. The two that do not:
The best value at the time of writing. 2 cores, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe, IPv4 included, and unlimited traffic so there is no arithmetic to do at all.
One caveat: the advertised price is a “starting at” figure. Check what it renews at before you commit.
Hetzner has the best reputation for network quality in this price range, and it bills by the hour against a monthly cap — so if you tear the server down between streams, 120 hours a month genuinely costs less than the headline.
Two things to know:
Hetzner's cheap line is currently unavailable. The entire Cost-Optimized range — the x86 CX23/CX33 and the ARM CAX plans — shows “currently unavailable” and the Create button is disabled. Prices are still listed, which suggests this is temporary, but today the cheapest orderable Hetzner is CPX12. That makes Hetzner roughly twice the price of OVH rather than the bargain it used to be. Worth re-checking — if CX23 comes back at €5.49 it is the best buy on this page.
Hetzner servers ship with no public address. You have to add a Primary IPv4 yourself for €0.50/month. Miss it and you get an IPv6-only box, which a bonded backpack cannot reach. Their firewall is also default-deny, so open your UDP port there as well as on the machine.
Worth the few extra dollars for one reason: they have 30-plus locations, so you can sit close to your platform's ingest.
Put the server near the platform you stream to, not near yourself.
This is the opposite of what feels right, but bonding already solves the first hop: SRTLA is built to get your video from a moving vehicle to the server across bad connections. What it cannot help with is the server-to-YouTube leg. Give that one the short, stable path.
Ubuntu, any recent LTS. The receiver needs Docker Engine 20.10 or newer running Linux containers, a POSIX shell, standard shell utilities and curl or wget; no Compose or compiler is needed. If the machine does not have Docker, the installer stops and prints the one-line command that installs it (curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh) — run that, then run the receiver command again. Debian and most other distributions work too, but Ubuntu is the best-tested path.
Once the machine exists, open a terminal on it and paste:
wget -qO- https://streamhelpers.com/receiver | sh
It asks you nothing, downloads a ready-built receiver container and starts it, then prints the address of the receiver's own settings page. Open that page, add a Tailscale key (the page links to where you get one), and copy the pairing code it shows back into your dashboard. The full walkthrough, including the one port to open, is Your own streaming server.
You may not need to rent anything. A NAS, a spare Linux box or a Windows PC with Docker Desktop (WSL 2 backend) all work, and the receiver installs the same way. Two things a machine at home needs that a rented one does not:
Intel and Apple Silicon Macs with Docker Desktop are also supported. For Windows, an existing Ubuntu distribution must actually be WSL 2: updating WSL's runtime does not convert WSL 1. Enable that distribution in Docker Desktop's WSL Integration settings. After installation, open http://localhost:8088 on the Mac or Windows computer and add a Tailscale auth key before expecting a pairing code. The full walkthrough covers Windows commands, Docker integration, DNS failures and private WSL addresses.
On Unraid, read Running the receiver on Unraid first.