Plex / Jellyfin / Mediaserver

Lots of disk, occasional transcoding.

Storage is the bottleneck. 1 TB+ and a mid-range CPU for transcoding (h264 → ~1 vCPU per stream). Direct play only? Minimal CPU. Bandwidth: 4K streams are ~15-25 Mbps each.

RAM ≥ 4 GB CPU ≥ 4 cores Storage ≥ 500 GB High bandwidth

Recommended plans

Chosen for fitting the requirements and the price/performance for this workload.

Why: 800GB SSD under €13 — unbeatable for a media server

contabo/storage-vps-30.json 9 regions · Contabo

Contabo Storage VPS 30

1 TB SSD, 18 GB RAM, 6 vCPU for mediaservers.

$15.22 /mo

~15 ms Best for Plex

4.5

vCPU

6 Intel/AMD shared

RAM

18 GB

SSD

1000 GB

Bandwidth

∞ unmetered

6 vCPU 18 GB RAM 1000 GB SSD ∞

Details

Why: 2× 512GB NVMe + unlimited traffic for streaming

hetzner/ax42.json 2 regions · Hetzner

Hetzner AX42

Ryzen 7 PRO 8700GE — 8 cores, 64 GB DDR5, 2× NVMe.

$54.35 /mo

~25 ms ★ Featured Best dedicatedDDR5

4.9

Dedicated CPU

8 AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 8700GE

RAM

64 GB

NVME

512 × 2

Bandwidth

∞ unmetered

8 CPU 64 GB RAM 512 GB NVME ∞

Get plan Affiliate

Details

Why: Back up your library for €3.81/TB

hetzner/storage-box-1tb.json 3 regions · Hetzner

Hetzner Storage Box BX11

Cheap WebDAV/SMB/SFTP storage. 1 TB.

$4.14 /mo

~25 ms Backup

4.6

Regions

1024 GB

Get plan Affiliate

Details

Operational tips

Direct play > transcoding (uses far less CPU)
Hetzner Storage Box is NOT block storage; it mounts only via NFS/SMB
Consider Cloudflare R2 for larger-scale offload (zero egress)