Owncast Hosting on Your Own VPS
Your own live streaming server with chat, on your own domain and terms.
Size a server for Owncast
Every stop is a real configuration you can deploy. Priced per 30 days, billed by the hour, exclusive of 18% GST.
What Owncast is
Owncast is a self-hosted live streaming server. You point OBS or any RTMP encoder at it, and viewers watch on your own domain with a built-in chat — a self-contained alternative to streaming on someone else's platform.
The reason people run it is independence: no content rules beyond your own, no revenue share, no algorithm deciding who sees the stream, and no risk of an account action taking the channel away.
The constraint is bandwidth, and it is worth arithmetic rather than optimism. A 3 Mbps stream with fifty concurrent viewers is 150 Mbps sustained. That is real traffic, and unlike a big platform there is no CDN absorbing it unless you put one in front. Owncast supports transcoding to several qualities, which helps viewers on poor connections but multiplies the CPU cost of every stream.
Why run Owncast on a VPS
Your domain, your rules — no platform policy and no revenue share.
10 Gbps uplinks, which matters when concurrent viewers multiply your bitrate.
Root access for ffmpeg and transcoding configuration.
Indian regions to keep latency low for Indian audiences.
Owncast features
RTMP ingest from OBS or any standard encoder
Built-in chat with moderation
Multiple quality variants via transcoding
Customisable appearance and pages
Fediverse integration for follower notifications
Viewer metrics and stream history
Recommended server
A starting point for Owncast, not a hard floor — size it on the sliders.
| Memory | 4 GB for pass-through; 8 GB once transcoding to several qualities |
|---|---|
| CPU | 4 vCPU minimum if transcoding — ffmpeg is the whole workload |
| Storage | 40 GB, more if you keep recordings |
| Operating system | Ubuntu 22.04 LTS |
How deployment works
Owncast is installed as a service behind TLS with its RTMP ingest port open to your encoder. Do the bandwidth arithmetic before going live: bitrate times concurrent viewers is sustained outbound traffic, and transcoding to multiple qualities multiplies CPU per stream. Pass-through of a single quality is far cheaper if your audience can take it.
What people run it for
Independent streaming
A channel nobody else can demonetise or remove.
Events and conferences
A stream on your own domain for a specific audience.
Teaching and workshops
Live sessions with chat, without a platform between you and attendees.
Community broadcasts
Regular streams to a following you own the relationship with.
Owncast hosting questions
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Root access, your choice of size, and no container between you and the application.