Multistreaming — pushing one live broadcast to Twitch, YouTube, Kick and more at the same time — usually means paying a SaaS like Restream.io a monthly per-platform fee. You can do the exact same thing on a single VPS you control, with no per-destination charge and no quality cap beyond your own bandwidth. Here is how.
Why self-host your multistream relay?
Hosted multistream services charge every month and limit how many destinations or how high a bitrate you get. A streaming VPS flips the economics: you run an open-source relay (Nginx-RTMP or Restreamer) on your own server, push one feed from OBS, and the server fans it out to every platform. You pay a flat VPS price from EUR 9.99/mo and nothing per platform.
- No per-destination fees — add Twitch, YouTube, Kick, Facebook or any custom RTMP endpoint; the price is the same.
- Your keys, your relay — stream keys and recordings stay on a box you own.
- Bandwidth headroom — streaming plans run with unmetered traffic and no per-VM bandwidth ceiling, so a 24/7 broadcast never hits a data cap.
What you need
A single streaming VPS handles a typical multistream. A 6 Mbps OBS feed copied to three 1080p destinations is roughly 18 Mbps of egress — trivial for an unmetered port. Pick a plan on the streaming VPS page; the entry tier is enough for most creators, and you can scale up if you add transcoding.
Step 1 — Deploy the VPS
Spin up a streaming VPS in a region close to you for low ingest latency. You get full root on a plain Linux image, so you install your relay of choice yourself — the next step covers Nginx-RTMP and Restreamer, and MediaMTX, MistServer or Owncast work just as well.
Step 2 — Install an RTMP relay
Two common choices: Nginx-RTMP (lightweight, config-file driven, ideal for pure fan-out) or Restreamer (a web UI on top of FFmpeg if you prefer clicking to editing configs). For Nginx-RTMP, the relay is a single application block that receives your OBS feed and pushes a copy to each platform:
rtmp {
server {
listen 1935;
chunk_size 4096;
application live {
live on;
record off;
# Fan the incoming OBS feed out to each platform
push rtmp://live.twitch.tv/app/YOUR_TWITCH_KEY;
push rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/YOUR_YOUTUBE_KEY;
push rtmp://ingest.kick.com/live/YOUR_KICK_KEY;
}
}
}Reload nginx and the relay is live. Each push line is one destination — add or remove platforms freely, with no extra charge per line.
Step 3 — Point OBS at your VPS
In OBS, open Settings → Stream and choose Custom:
- Server: rtmp://YOUR_VPS_IP/live
- Stream key: anything (for example, stream)
Hit Start Streaming. OBS sends one feed to your VPS; the VPS delivers it to Twitch, YouTube and Kick at once. Your upload only ever carries a single stream, which is far gentler on a home connection than pushing three copies yourself.
Bitrate and quality
Because the relay copies the same stream to every platform, encode once in OBS at the settings your most restrictive platform accepts — 1080p60 at 6,000 Kbps is a safe baseline. If you need different renditions per platform, run a transcode ladder on a larger shape; the streaming plans are unmetered with no per-VM bandwidth ceiling, which leaves plenty of room.
The cost case
A hosted multistream subscription is billed monthly and scales with destinations and quality. A self-hosted relay on a streaming VPS is a flat EUR 9.99/mo and up, no per-platform fee, with 100 Gbps DDoS protection and unmetered bandwidth included on our own AS60982 network. For anyone streaming regularly to more than one platform, it pays for itself quickly.
Going further
The same VPS can record your broadcasts, serve a low-latency HLS / LL-HLS player on your own site, ingest IRL / SRT field feeds, and run WebRTC for sub-second latency. See the live-streaming use case for protocol details, or pick a streaming VPS to get started.