Run Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby on a Pulsar67 VPS so your library is reachable from anywhere with generous bandwidth included, without exposing your home IP, fighting CGNAT, or asking your ISP for an open port.
Hosting Plex at home is great until your ISP decides residential uplink isn't for "video servers", you're behind CGNAT, or you want to share with family and don't want to give them your home IP.
A VPS gives Plex a clean public IP, business-class uplink, and a static address so the apps "just connect." Pair with rclone mounts (Google Drive / OneDrive / S3) or your own storage and it's effectively unlimited.
10 Gbps backbone. Plex Direct Play streams hit line rate; no residential cap.
Static address, not behind CGNAT. The Plex clients connect first try.
Mount cloud storage as a filesystem. Effectively unlimited library size for ~zero extra cost.
Library scans and metadata writes hit SAS SSD. Cover-art browsing actually feels snappy.
Direct Play barely needs CPU. Transcoding hits the cores hard.
CPU-only transcoding is slower than GPU. If your viewers' clients can Direct Play, Starter is fine for most H.264 / H.265 libraries.
Not CGNAT. Plex remote access works the first time.
Even 4K streams per viewer barely register on this network.
Plex shares often get hit by abuse. Always-on at our edge.
$5/$15/month flat. No per-stream or per-viewer billing.
A Plex or Jellyfin box your family can reach without your home IP, your home ISP, or your home power outages.
Concrete setup details for the first deploy, the firewall, and the first thing to check when something acts strange.
Plex uses TCP 32400. Jellyfin uses TCP 8096. Put web access behind HTTPS where possible and limit admin exposure.
Starter is enough for Direct Play. Pro gives more room for metadata scans and multiple users, but GPU-heavy transcoding is not the goal on these VPS plans.
Use Direct Play-friendly media formats, mount storage carefully, and keep metadata/cache on local SAS SSD.
If streams buffer, check whether the client is transcoding, then inspect bitrate, upload cap, and remote storage latency.