Most people run OBS on the machine in front of them, which means the stream dies the moment the laptop sleeps, the Wi-Fi hiccups, or the power blips. A VPS for OBS streaming moves the encoder off your desk and into a datacenter, so it runs headless, restarts on its own, and keeps pushing frames whether you are awake or not. This is our notes-from-the-rack take on running headless OBS and looping content 24/7 on a box that ships with the streaming stack already installed. We will do the bandwidth math, because that math is the whole reason people leave metered clouds.
Why a VPS for OBS Streaming Beats Your Desktop
A desktop encoder is fine for a two-hour session you babysit. It falls apart the second you want an always-on stream: a 24/7 music channel, a security-cam mosaic, a looping product demo, a church or event feed that has to survive the night shift. On a streaming VPS you run OBS with no display attached, drive it over the WebSocket API or a virtual X server, and let systemd bring it back if it ever exits. No local upload cap, no "my roommate started a download and the bitrate tanked," no thermal throttling on a gaming laptop that was never meant to encode for weeks straight.
Because our streaming boxes come with OBS, Nginx-RTMP, MediaMTX, MistServer, Owncast, and Restreamer pre-installed, you are not spending an evening compiling FFmpeg or chasing codec flags. You SSH in as root, point OBS at your source, and choose an ingest and delivery protocol: RTMP, RTMPS, SRT, HLS, or LL-HLS. That covers pushing to Twitch and YouTube, ingesting a contribution feed over SRT, and serving your own low-latency HLS to viewers directly.
The bandwidth math: bitrate x viewers x hours
Here is where a 24/7 livestream VPS either saves you money or quietly bankrupts you, depending on how it bills egress. The formula is simple: sustained throughput equals bitrate multiplied by concurrent viewers, and total transfer is that throughput multiplied by hours.
Say you self-serve a 6 Mbps 1080p HLS stream. One viewer for one hour is 6 Mbps x 3600 s / 8 = about 2.7 GB. Now scale it:
| Scenario | Throughput | Egress over 30 days |
|---|---|---|
| 6 Mbps stream, 10 viewers | 60 Mbps | ~19 TB |
| 6 Mbps stream, 50 viewers | 300 Mbps | ~97 TB |
| 6 Mbps stream, 200 viewers | 1.2 Gbps | ~389 TB |
Two things fall out of that table. First, if you are only pushing a single contribution feed up to Twitch or YouTube, your egress is tiny — one 6 Mbps stream is under 2 TB a month, and any plan handles it. The port speed matters more for headroom and burst than for the total. Second, the moment you self-host delivery to an audience, egress explodes into the tens or hundreds of terabytes, and that is exactly the number metered clouds charge on.
Why 10 Gbps unmetered kills the cloud egress bill
On a hyperscaler, egress is billed per gigabyte after a thin free tier — commonly on the order of cents per GB. Run the 50-viewer case above at, say, 5 cents per GB and 97 TB lands you a four-figure monthly transfer bill on top of the instance. The 200-viewer case is worse by design. That pricing model punishes the one thing streaming does: move bytes out.
Our streaming VPS line is 10 Gbps unmetered symmetric on NVMe, from EUR 9.99/mo up to EUR 139.99/mo. Unmetered means the 97 TB month and the 2 TB month cost the same flat plan price — you are paying for the pipe, not the packets. Symmetric matters because a headless OBS box both ingests (SRT/RTMP in) and delivers (HLS/RTMP out), and you do not want the upstream half of that starved. Ten gigabit of headroom also absorbs viewer spikes without re-buffering; the 200-viewer 1.2 Gbps case still leaves most of the port idle.
This is the trade the whole "cloud OBS VPS" comparison comes down to: metered clouds make streaming a variable, scary line item; a flat unmetered box makes it a fixed cost you can forget about. For always-on channels that run every hour of the month, the flat model wins outright.
Sizing the box for your encode
Encoding is CPU-bound. If OBS is transcoding — taking a source and re-encoding to one or several output renditions with x264 — vCPU count is your ceiling. A single 1080p x264 stream at a reasonable preset is comfortable on a mid tier; multiple renditions or 4K want more cores. If you are only remuxing or passing through a pre-encoded source (looping an MP4 to RTMP, for instance), CPU load is light and you are really buying RAM, disk for the media library, and the port.
The plan range spans 2GB/1 vCPU/30GB at the entry end to 32GB/12 vCPU/500GB at the top, all on the same 10 Gbps unmetered fabric. Loop a channel from the small tier; run a multi-bitrate transcode ladder on the large one. If your real workload is a set-and-forget looping feed rather than live production, the streaming VPS page lists every tier and what ships on it.
Where the box lives
Latency to your viewers and to the platforms you push to is a function of geography and peering. Our streaming POPs sit in Amsterdam and Frankfurt — two of the best-connected exchanges in Europe — on our own AS60982 network with 15 IXs and 34+ carriers behind it, and sub-5ms intra-EU. That keeps your SRT contribution ingest tight and your first-hop to Twitch/YouTube short. Every plan also carries free 1 Tbps DDoS protection, which for a public 24/7 stream is not optional — an always-on endpoint is an always-on target. The network page has the full topology if you want to check peering to your region.
How Noded Can Help
We built the streaming VPS line because we got tired of watching people fight metered egress and half-installed encoders. Our boxes hand you a headless OBS server that is ready on first boot: OBS, Nginx-RTMP, MediaMTX, MistServer, Owncast, and Restreamer already there, RTMP/RTMPS/SRT/HLS/LL-HLS ready to configure, 10 Gbps unmetered symmetric so the bandwidth math stops being your problem. Deploy is a median 47 seconds, billing is flat, and if you ever outgrow a single node the same network carries our general VPS and dedicated tiers. Pick a size on the streaming VPS page and you can have a 24/7 loop running before your coffee is cold.
FAQ
Can I run OBS headless on a VPS?
Yes. Our streaming VPS ships with OBS pre-installed, and you run it with no attached display — driven over the OBS WebSocket API or a virtual X server — then keep it alive with systemd so it restarts automatically. That is the standard always-on stream VPS setup.
How much bandwidth does a 24/7 stream use?
Multiply bitrate by concurrent viewers, then by hours. A 6 Mbps stream to 50 viewers is about 300 Mbps sustained, or roughly 97 TB a month. Pushing a single feed up to Twitch or YouTube is far less — under 2 TB a month for one 6 Mbps stream.
Why is unmetered better than a metered cloud for streaming?
Metered clouds bill per gigabyte of egress, so a busy 24/7 stream can run into four figures in transfer alone. Our 10 Gbps unmetered symmetric plans charge a flat rate no matter how many terabytes leave, which turns streaming from a variable bill into a fixed cost.
What protocols can I ingest and deliver with?
RTMP, RTMPS, SRT, HLS, and LL-HLS. That covers pushing to major platforms, ingesting a contribution feed over SRT, and self-serving low-latency HLS to your own viewers directly from the box.
What size streaming VPS do I need?
If OBS is transcoding, buy vCPU — one 1080p x264 stream is fine on a mid tier, multiple renditions or 4K want more cores. If you are looping a pre-encoded source, load is light and you mostly need RAM and disk. Plans run from 2GB/1 vCPU up to 32GB/12 vCPU, all on the same 10 Gbps port.