Running a 24/7 live stream on a VPS costs â¹3,000-â¹12,000 ($32-$125) a month in server fees alone, but bandwidth is what actually decides your bill. At a typical 5 Mbps 1080p bitrate, every hour a single viewer watches burns about 2.25 GB, so a 2 TB/month plan caps out around 900 viewer-hours before you hit overage or need to add a CDN. Once you add optional costs – a licensed engine like Wowza (+â¹9,500/mo), GPU transcoding for multi-bitrate ABR (~â¹36,000-â¹40,000/mo for a 24/7 cloud GPU instance), CDN delivery, and VOD storage – a real moderate-traffic 24/7 channel typically lands between â¹6,000 and â¹40,000+ ($65-$420+) per month. The exact number depends far more on your bandwidth-per-viewer-hour math than on which server tier you pick.
Key Takeaways
- A dedicated streaming VPS costs â¹3,000-â¹12,000/month ($32-$125) depending on CPU/RAM/bandwidth tier – this is usually the smallest and most predictable line item.
- Bandwidth is the real cost driver: at 5 Mbps (1080p), every viewer-hour consumes ~2.25 GB, so an included bandwidth cap translates directly into a viewer-hours-per-month budget.
- Cloud egress and CDN pricing (AWS CloudFront $0.085/GB, Cloudflare Stream $0.001/minute delivered) can beat a flat VPS bandwidth cap at low volume, but often cost more than simply upgrading VPS tiers once you’re running 24/7 at meaningful concurrency.
- Open-source engines (NGINX-RTMP, Ant Media, Red5, SRT, MistServer) carry no license fee; Wowza Streaming Engine adds a fixed cost (+â¹9,500/month on StreamingVPS) on top of server fees.
- GPU transcoding for real-time multi-bitrate ABR is the single biggest optional cost adder – budget roughly â¹36,000-â¹40,000/month for a continuous cloud GPU instance, or skip it if your encoder already outputs multiple bitrates.
What Does a Streaming VPS Actually Cost Per Month?
Server cost is the one number every provider publishes, and it’s the easiest part of the budget to nail down. Here’s what a pre-installed streaming VPS costs at each tier (approximate USD at ~â¹95/$1, July 2026):
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | SSD | Bandwidth included | Price/month (INR) | Price/month (approx USD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 2 | 4 GB | 80 GB | 1 TB | â¹3,000 | ~$32 |
| Business | 4 | 8 GB | 80 GB | 2 TB | â¹6,000 | ~$63 |
| Enterprise | 8 | 32 GB | 120 GB | 8 TB | â¹12,000 | ~$126 |
Open-source engines – NGINX-RTMP, SRT, Ant Media, Red5, and MistServer – are pre-installed at no extra charge on every tier. Wowza Streaming Engine is a licensed add-on at +â¹9,500/month, and Flusonic pricing is quote-based. If your traffic is occasional rather than continuous, a pay-per-TB shared streaming server (no monthly commitment) is usually cheaper than reserving a dedicated VPS you won’t fully use.
The mistake most people make here is budgeting only for this line item and being surprised later – server cost is rarely what breaks a streaming budget. Bandwidth is.
How Much Bandwidth Does 24/7 Streaming Actually Use?
This is the calculation that matters most and the one most buying guides skip. Bandwidth used scales with bitrate x concurrent viewers x hours watched, not with uptime alone. The formula: 1 Mbps of sustained bitrate consumes approximately 0.45 GB per viewer-hour (1 Mbps x 3,600 seconds / 8 bits per byte ~ 450 MB).
Applying that across common streaming bitrates:
| Bitrate (typical use) | GB per viewer-hour | Viewer-hours per 1 TB | Viewer-hours per 2 TB | Viewer-hours per 8 TB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 Mbps (720p standard) | 0.9 GB | ~1,140 | ~2,280 | ~9,100 |
| 5 Mbps (1080p, good quality) | 2.25 GB | ~455 | ~910 | ~3,640 |
| 8 Mbps (1080p high bitrate) | 3.6 GB | ~285 | ~570 | ~2,275 |
| 15 Mbps (4K) | 6.75 GB | ~152 | ~303 | ~1,213 |
In practice: a channel streaming at 1080p/5 Mbps on the Business tier (2 TB included) has roughly 910 viewer-hours of headroom per month before overage discussions start – that’s about 30 viewer-hours/day, which a handful of concurrent viewers watching a few hours daily will exceed quickly. Multi-bitrate ABR ladders (see our ABR ladder guide) make this worse for total bandwidth even as they improve viewer experience, since lower rungs still consume bandwidth for viewers on weaker connections.
Is Cloud Hosting (AWS CloudFront, Cloudflare Stream) Cheaper Than a VPS for Live Streaming?
It depends entirely on volume, and the math is worth doing before you assume either option is cheaper. As of mid-2026, AWS CloudFront charges $0.085/GB for the first 10 TB/month in the US/EU tier after a 1 TB free allowance (AWS CloudFront pricing). Cloudflare Stream charges a flat $0.001 per minute of video delivered regardless of resolution, with no separate egress fee (Cloudflare Stream pricing).
At a 5 Mbps (1080p) bitrate, that works out to:
| Delivery method | Cost per viewer-hour | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| AWS CloudFront egress | ~$0.19 (~â¹18) | Cost scales with bitrate – cheaper at lower resolutions |
| Cloudflare Stream | $0.06 (~â¹5.70) | Flat per-minute rate regardless of bitrate |
| StreamingVPS Business tier | ~â¹6.60 effective, flat | Fixed â¹6,000/mo covers ~910 viewer-hours, then requires an upgrade |
For our own worked example below, a moderately busy 24/7 channel blows past the flat-rate VPS bandwidth cap and past what pay-per-minute cloud delivery would cost for the same traffic – meaning a VPS upgrade is usually the cheaper move at real volume. Where cloud pay-per-use genuinely wins: a low-traffic or sporadic stream (under roughly 50-100 viewer-hours/month), where a $3-$6 Cloudflare Stream bill beats even the cheapest â¹3,000 VPS tier. If your channel is that small, a shared/pay-per-TB plan or a cloud-native player may be the more honest recommendation than a dedicated VPS.
What Other Costs Should You Budget For?
Server and bandwidth cover the baseline. Depending on what your channel actually needs, budget for:
Licensed engines. Wowza Streaming Engine adds +â¹9,500/month on StreamingVPS. NGINX-RTMP, Ant Media Community Edition, Red5, SRT, and MistServer are open-source and free to run – see our Wowza vs Ant Media vs NGINX RTMP comparison for which fits your use case.
GPU transcoding. If you need real-time multi-bitrate ABR and your source encoder only outputs one rendition, a hardware-accelerated transcode pass is the next cost. A mid-tier cloud GPU instance like an AWS g4dn.xlarge (NVIDIA T4, 4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM) runs about $0.526/hour – roughly $384 (~â¹36,500) per month if kept on continuously (AWS EC2 pricing). Running the GPU instance only during actual broadcast windows cuts this proportionally.
VOD/DVR storage. If you record streams for on-demand playback or DVR rewind, expect roughly $0.02-$0.03 per GB-month for off-VPS object storage, on top of whatever local SSD you keep for hot/recent recordings. Our VOD storage sizing guide covers this in more depth.
CDN. Only worth adding once a single origin VPS becomes the bottleneck for concurrent viewers or global reach – see our dedicated CDN for live streaming guide for when that threshold actually arrives.
Operational overhead. Backups/snapshots typically add 10-20% on top of base server cost; monitoring tools can be free (self-hosted) or a modest SaaS fee.
How Much Does a Real 24/7 Channel Actually Cost? A Worked Example
Take a realistic case: an IPTV-style channel broadcasting 12 hours/day live (with the rest looped VOD), averaging 8 concurrent viewers at 3 Mbps (720p).
- Viewer-hours/month: 8 viewers x 12 hours x 30 days = 2,880 viewer-hours
- Bandwidth used: 2,880 x 1.35 GB (3 Mbps rate) ~ 3.9 TB/month
That exceeds the Business tier’s 2 TB allowance, so the realistic choice is the Enterprise tier (8 TB, â¹12,000/month) rather than paying overage. Compare that flat cost against the pay-per-minute alternative: 2,880 viewer-hours x 60 minutes x $0.001 = $172.80/month (~â¹16,400) on Cloudflare Stream alone, before adding compute for encoding. The Enterprise VPS, which bundles compute, storage, and bandwidth in one price, comes out cheaper at this volume.
Add Wowza if the channel needs it: â¹12,000 + â¹9,500 = â¹21,500/month (~$226) – still meaningfully less than a comparable cloud stack once you price in a separate GPU transcoding instance and CDN on top of raw egress, which can easily push an equivalent cloud-native setup past â¹50,000/month.
FAQ
How much does it cost to livestream 24/7 on a VPS?
A 24/7 live stream on a VPS typically costs â¹3,000-â¹12,000 ($32-$125) per month for the server itself, with bandwidth usage – roughly 2.25 GB per viewer-hour at 1080p/5 Mbps – determining whether you stay within the included data cap or need a higher tier.
Is a VPS cheaper than AWS or Cloudflare for live streaming?
For sustained 24/7 traffic, a flat-rate VPS is usually cheaper than pay-per-GB cloud egress once you exceed a few hundred viewer-hours per month; cloud pay-per-use only wins for very low or sporadic traffic under roughly 50-100 viewer-hours per month.
Does Wowza cost extra on top of VPS hosting?
Yes. Wowza Streaming Engine is a licensed product and costs an additional fixed fee (â¹9,500/month on StreamingVPS) on top of the base VPS price, while open-source engines like NGINX-RTMP, Ant Media, Red5, SRT, and MistServer carry no license fee.
How much does GPU transcoding add to streaming costs?
Real-time GPU transcoding for multi-bitrate ABR typically adds around $0.50-$0.55 per hour – roughly â¹36,000-â¹40,000/month if run continuously – for a mid-tier cloud GPU instance like an AWS g4dn.xlarge. You can skip this cost entirely if your source encoder already outputs multiple bitrates.
What’s the single biggest hidden cost in live streaming?
Bandwidth overage is the most common hidden cost. Because data usage scales directly with concurrent viewers and bitrate, a channel that grows in popularity can blow past an included bandwidth cap far faster than its server or software costs change.
Conclusion
Server cost is the easy 10% of a live streaming budget – bandwidth math, optional GPU transcoding, and licensing decide the other 90%. Work out your expected viewer-hours per month at your target bitrate first, then pick a tier (or a pay-per-TB plan) that actually matches that number instead of guessing.
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Last updated: July 6, 2026. Reviewed by the StreamingVPS.com Engineering Team.
