☁️ IPTV Server in the Cloud — VPS Comparison 2026
Want to host your Jellyfin or Threadfin in the cloud instead of at home on a NAS? A comparison of Hetzner, OVH, AWS, and DigitalOcean on specs, costs, bandwidth, and suitability for IPTV.
🤔 Why a cloud server?
- ✅ Always reachable — no home-internet outage issues
- ✅ Fast uplink — 1Gbps standard, multi-gigabit possible
- ✅ No local hardware — no failing drives
- ✅ Multi-location — several people can watch from different locations
- ⚠️ Monthly costs — $4–$50/mo depending on plan
- ⚠️ Egress data costs with some providers (AWS!)
⚡ Best VPS providers for IPTV (2026)
🥇 Hetzner — Best price/spec
Plan: CX22 ($5/mo) — 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 40GB SSD, 20TB traffic
Plan: CX42 ($17/mo) — 8 vCPU, 16GB RAM, 160GB SSD, 20TB traffic
- ✅ European data centers (low latency in the EU)
- ✅ Generous 20TB+ traffic per month
- ✅ Cheapest for the specs
- ✅ Good uptime, stable
- ⚠️ No managed services — you handle everything yourself
For Jellyfin: CX22 is enough for 1-2 simultaneous streams without transcoding. CX42 for heavy transcoding.
🥈 OVH — European alternative
Plan: VLE-1 ($4.50/mo) — 1 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 20GB SSD, unmetered
Plan: VPS Comfort ($13/mo) — 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 160GB SSD
- ✅ Comparable to Hetzner pricing
- ✅ EU and global data centers (Roubaix, Strasbourg)
- ✅ Unmetered traffic on all plans
- ⚠️ Fire outage in 2021 — better monitoring since then
🥉 DigitalOcean — Dev favorite
Plan: Basic Droplet ($6/mo) — 1GB RAM, 25GB SSD, 1TB traffic
Plan: Premium ($12/mo) — 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD, 2TB traffic
- ✅ Many data centers worldwide
- ✅ Excellent docs and community
- ✅ One-click apps (Jellyfin not available)
- ⚠️ Slightly more expensive than Hetzner per spec
- ⚠️ Limited traffic — extra cost $0.01/GB
4. AWS / Azure / GCP — For enterprise
AWS t3.small: ~$15/mo (2 vCPU, 2GB RAM) + $0.09/GB egress
- ⚠️ Egress costs are dangerous — 1TB of streaming = $90 extra
- ⚠️ Too expensive for the IPTV use case
- ✅ Useful for: on-demand bursts (transcoding jobs)
Avoid for IPTV self-hosting.
5. Contabo — Extreme budget
Plan: VPS S ($5/mo) — 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 50GB NVMe, 32TB traffic
- ✅ Ridiculous amount of specs for the money
- ✅ Lots of traffic included
- ⚠️ Variable performance (shared hosting)
- ⚠️ Setup takes longer (24-72h)
- ⚠️ Slow support
Who is it for: if price is everything and you have patience.
📊 Quick comparison
| Provider | Basic plan | RAM | Traffic | EU? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner | $5 | 4GB | 20TB | ✅ | Best price/spec |
| OVH | $4.50 | 2GB | Unmetered | ✅ | EU-focused |
| Contabo | $5.00 | 8GB | 32TB | ✅ | Specs-budget |
| DigitalOcean | $6.00 | 1GB | 1TB | ✅ | Polished UX |
| Hostinger VPS | $5.00 | 4GB | 4TB | ✅ | Mid-tier |
| AWS Lightsail | $5 | 1GB | 2TB | ✅ | AWS ecosystem |
⚙️ Minimum specs for Jellyfin IPTV
| Use case | Minimum specs | Recommended |
|---|---|---|
| 1 stream direct play | 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM | 2 vCPU, 2GB |
| 2-3 streams direct play | 2 vCPU, 2GB RAM | 4 vCPU, 4GB |
| 1 stream transcoding (4K → 1080p) | 4 vCPU, 4GB RAM | 8 vCPU + GPU |
| Threadfin proxy only | 1 vCPU, 512MB | 1 vCPU, 1GB |
Tip: "Direct play" without transcoding is light on CPU. Transcoding is heavy — consider a GPU instance or an upgrade.
🛡 Setup essentials
- OS: Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS — most common
- SSH key — no password login
- UFW firewall — only ports 22, 80, 443 open
- Fail2ban — brute force protection
- Reverse proxy — Caddy or Nginx for HTTPS
- Your own domain — Cloudflare for DNS + DDoS protection (free)
- Auto-updates — the unattended-upgrades package
- Backups — Hetzner offers snapshots ($0.01/GB/mo)
🌐 Bandwidth calculation
For 1080p HEVC streaming:
- 5 Mbps per stream
- 1 stream 24/7 = ~55 GB/day = ~1.6 TB/month
- 5 streams = 8 TB/month
- 20TB Hetzner = more than enough
- 1TB DigitalOcean = tight
For a 4K stream: bandwidth × 3.
🎯 Recommendation per situation
- Best overall: Hetzner CX22 ($5/mo) — 90% of use cases
- Heavy transcoding: Hetzner CX42 ($17/mo)
- Ridiculous specs on a budget: Contabo VPS M ($8/mo, 6 vCPU/16GB)
- Nice UX: DigitalOcean
- Don't do this: AWS/Azure for IPTV — egress costs are too high