Published: 9 October 2026
A guaranteed 1 Gbps port streams 1080p to about 160 people at once, and 10 Gbps to about 1,600. The rule is port speed × 80% ÷ bitrate. Below are the numbers for every port we sell, what an audience costs in monthly traffic, and when a dedicated server beats a streaming VPS.
The formula
Viewers = port speed × 80% ÷ bitrate per viewer.
The 80% leaves room for bursts, retransmissions and the odd viewer on a higher-quality rendition. Our port pages quote the full line rate, 200 viewers per Gbps at 1080p; the figures here keep 20% in reserve. Typical delivery bitrates are about 3 Mbps for 720p, 5 Mbps for 1080p and 25 Mbps for 4K. Some guides assume 6 Mbps for 1080p, and at that rate a 10 Gbps port carries about 1,330 viewers. Adaptive streams offer several renditions, so use the one most of your audience actually watches.
Viewers per port
| Port | 720p at 3 Mbps | 1080p at 5 Mbps | 4K at 25 Mbps | Cheapest server |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Gbps | 266 | 160 | 32 | €209 |
| 2 Gbps | 533 | 320 | 64 | €259 |
| 5 Gbps | 1,333 | 800 | 160 | €519 |
| 10 Gbps | 2,666 | 1,600 | 320 | €659 |
| 20 Gbps | 5,333 | 3,200 | 640 | €1,159 |
| 25 Gbps | 6,666 | 4,000 | 800 | €1,799 |
| 50 Gbps | 13,333 | 8,000 | 1,600 | €2,799 |
| 100 Gbps | 26,666 | 16,000 | 3,200 | €4,499 |
| 200 Gbps | 53,333 | 32,000 | 6,400 | €13,439 |
Prices are monthly and exclude VAT. Every port is unmetered and guaranteed, so its full capacity is yours at 9 pm on a Saturday as well as at 4 am. On a shared port, the same arithmetic only tells you the best case.
What an audience costs in traffic
One viewer watching 1080p at 5 Mbps uses about 2.25 GB per hour. That adds up quickly:
| Audience | Monthly traffic | Port we would use |
|---|---|---|
| 300 viewers, one 2-hour stream a week | About 6 TB | 2 Gbps |
| 500 viewers, 4 hours a day | About 135 TB | 5 Gbps, or 10 Gbps for €140 more on Xeon |
| 1,000 viewers, 3 hours a day | About 203 TB | 10 Gbps |
The port is sized for the peak audience, not the monthly total, which is why a weekly stream with 300 viewers needs 2 Gbps even though its monthly traffic is small. With an unmetered port the monthly total costs nothing extra. On a cloud platform it is billed per gigabyte: 203 TB sent out of AWS Frankfurt would cost about $14,000 in egress alone at list price, as we worked out in our post on cloud egress fees.
Streaming VPS or dedicated server?
For small audiences, a dedicated server is more than you need. Our streaming VPS runs on a shared 10 Gbps port and is the right place to start for a channel, a church service or a small event. Move to a dedicated server when:
- your peak audience is regularly in the hundreds and you need the bandwidth guaranteed rather than shared;
- you transcode on the same machine. Live transcoding uses many cores, and a dedicated server gives you all of them. Our post on video transcoding servers covers sizing;
- you store a large video library and want many terabytes of SSD on the same machine as the port;
- you are the origin for a CDN, and every cache miss should be cheap and fast.
Every dedicated server also sits behind 1 Tbps always-on DDoS protection (L3/L4), which matters for public streams.
Serve directly or behind a CDN?
With an unmetered origin, a CDN is a choice rather than a way to cut traffic costs. Serving straight from the dedicated server keeps things simple and costs nothing per viewer. A CDN earns its place when your audience is spread across continents, or when a single event could outgrow your port: it caches segments close to viewers, and your server only feeds the CDN. CDNs bill their own delivery, usually per gigabyte, so compare that with the next port tier before you add one.
Beyond one port
Serve from RAM
Above a few gigabits per second, the bottleneck can move from the port to the disks: a single SATA SSD reads about 500 MB per second, roughly 4 Gbps. Live streams and popular on-demand titles sit in memory, which is why RAM matters for a delivery server. The dual E5 2699 v4 has 256 GB, and the EPYC servers go up to 1 TB with NVMe drives.
Spread across countries
Viewers far from the server see more buffering. If your audience is split between regions, two smaller servers in two countries often beat one big one. We sell the same servers in ten European countries and in the United States, at the same price.
Plan the next step
Watch your peak audience, not your average. When the peak reaches about 80% of the port, open a ticket and we will quote the next tier. Our post on port upgrades shows where each step is good value.
Ordering
Pick a server and port on the dedicated servers page, add SSDs for your library, and choose the country closest to your viewers. Xeon servers in stock are typically online within about an hour.