Sizing reference
How much VM do you need?
Directional capacity notes for copy-through fan-out, collected from real operational deployments on Hetzner. Treat these as starting points, not SLAs.
Copy-through fan-out
One ingest, many outputs, no re-encode. This is the default multistreaming workload and the one we have the most real-deployment data on.
| Instance | vCPU | RAM | Monthly | Capacity | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner CPX21 | 2 | 4 GB | €5–7 | Single OBS → 4–5 destinations | Small-scale personal / creator fan-out. Well below saturation. |
| Hetzner CPX31 | 4 | 8 GB | ~€15 | ~70 copy-through routes | Comfortable for a single-host agency deployment serving dozens of clients. |
| Hetzner CPX41 | 8 | 16 GB | ~€29 | 100+ copy-through routes | Headroom for batch ops and ingest spikes without saturation. |
Caveats
- All numbers assume typical live-stream bitrates (3–6 Mbps ingest) and no on-the-fly transcoding.
- Network egress and instance network cap are usually the first limits you hit before CPU — check your provider's egress policy per plan.
- Persistent storage IOPS mostly matter if you run DVR recording or large playlist files from the same disk.
- Distributed mode scales linearly — split load across media nodes instead of scaling up a single host when you outgrow the table above.
Transcoding & audio mixing
These workloads are CPU-bound, and the numbers look very different from copy-through fan-out — a single transcoded route can consume more CPU than dozens of copy-through routes on the same host.
We're not publishing numbers for transcoding or audio mixing until we have them measured on a controlled rig, because mis-sized transcoding deployments are where multistreaming projects quietly fail. If your workload needs transcoded outputs, mix-ins, or audio fan-out, ask sales for a sizing review and we'll match your input bitrate, ladder, and output count to a rig we've seen survive in production.