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.

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.

The plan must be Intel or AMD. Not ARM.

The receiver is built for ordinary x86-64 machines. It will not start on ARM, and ARM plans are very often the cheapest thing on the page — so the cheapest click and the working click are not the same click.

The traps, by name:

If the plan description says Ampere, it is ARM.

You do not have to get this right on the first try. The installer checks the machine's architecture before it downloads anything and stops with a plain message if you have landed on ARM. A mistake here costs a minute.

Modest, and less than most people assume:

• 2 GB of RAM — 1 GB is too tight once Restreamer is running
• 20 GB of disk — more only if you want long recordings
• A public IPv4 address — see the Hetzner note below, this is not always automatic
• One UDP port open, the one the installer tells you

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:

• DigitalOcean's $4 plan includes 500 GiB — fine for one platform, not for two.
• Hetzner Singapore includes 0.5 TB, where Hetzner Europe includes 20 TB.

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. No ARM plans to trip over.

• Contabo wins on paper — 4 cores and 8 GB for €4.40 — but their terms explicitly do not guarantee bandwidth and reserve the right to throttle. For live video that is the wrong trade.
• Oracle's always-free tier looks perfect and is not. The free shape worth having is Ampere ARM. The x86 one has 1 GB of RAM. Oracle also reclaims instances it considers idle.
• Vultr's $2.50 plan is IPv6-only. Same trap as ARM, different shape.
• Scaleway charges separately for the IP address and the disk, which erases the saving, and its cheap range is mostly ARM.

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 and nothing else; if the machine does not have it, 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:

1. It has to be reachable from outside — forward the UDP port on your router, and use a DDNS name if your home address is not static. If your ISP puts you behind carrier-grade NAT (a shared address), no port forward can work and the receiver's settings page will tell you so; a rented server is the answer then.
2. Your home upload speed becomes the ceiling. The receiver does not just catch your stream, it sends it on from your house. Bonding four modems into 15 Mbit/s achieves nothing if your broadband uploads at 8.

On Unraid, read Running the receiver on Unraid first.