SRTLA relay hosting: the bonded receiver you don't have to run

Prices for other services on this page were taken from their official websites on August 27, 2026 and copied without rounding or currency conversion. They may have changed since; check before you buy.

SRTLA is what makes a bonded IRL stream possible: your encoder splits the video across several modems, and something on the other end has to put the pieces back together. That something is an SRTLA server. It has to be online, reachable, and close enough to you that the round trip does not eat your latency budget. This page explains what that server actually does, when running your own is worth it, and what renting one costs.

What SRTLA is

SRTLA stands for SRT Link Aggregation. It comes out of the BELABOX project and it is a thin layer on top of SRT: your encoder opens one SRT connection per network interface — two SIM cards, a phone hotspot, the venue Wi-Fi — and spreads packets across all of them, shifting traffic away from links that are struggling. Moblin, BELABOX and most bonded Android setups speak it.

The catch is on the receiving end. A plain SRT server sees several unrelated connections and cannot make one video out of them. De-bonding needs an SRTLA receiver: it terminates every link, reassembles a single SRT stream and hands it on. Twitch, YouTube and Kick do not do this, and neither does a bare RTMP server on a VPS. That receiver is the thing people are looking for when they search for SRTLA server hosting.

What a hosted SRTLA server has to get right

  • Real de-bonding, not just an SRT port. Accepting SRTLA means running a receiver that reassembles the links. If a service lists SRT but says nothing about SRTLA, your bonded encoder will either connect over a single link or not at all — and the failure looks like an authentication problem, which sends people chasing the wrong bug.
  • A short path from your modems. Bonding buys resilience, not distance. Every extra hop between your SIM cards and the receiver comes out of the latency budget you set in the encoder, so the zone your key lives in matters more than the feature list.
  • Somewhere for the video to go next. A receiver on its own gives you a stream nobody is watching. It has to hand off: to the OBS on your desk, to a cloud OBS, or straight to the platform.
  • Credentials you control. One key you can rotate or revoke without rebuilding the profile on your encoder, and without asking anyone.
  • Headroom above your target bitrate. Bonded uplinks spike when two modems recover at once. A ceiling sitting exactly on your target bitrate will clip you every time that happens.

Running your own

It is entirely doable. The SRTLA receiver is open source and a small VPS will run it. What you are signing up for is the maintenance: keeping the receiver and the media server alive, watching UDP throughput, and being the person who fixes it from a phone, in another country, mid-stream. We wrote the honest version of that, commands included. Running your own IRL relay on a VPS: what it really costs.

The rule of thumb we would give a friend: self-host if the tinkering is part of the fun or the budget is genuinely zero. Rent if the stream is the product and a broken receiver is a broken evening.

SRTLA on Enhanced IRL

SRTLA is on every plan we sell, including the €5/month one. There is no bonding tier and no add-on to unlock: the same stream key accepts RTMP, SRT and SRTLA, so you can change protocol on the road without touching your account or your key.

That is worth saying plainly, because it is not how the market is priced. IRLToolkit, the best-known managed option, starts at $129/month, and BELABOX Cloud — which does exactly this job well — is a perk for GitHub sponsors of the project rather than a plan you can buy off a shelf.

  • One key, three protocols. RTMP, SRT and SRTLA on the same credentials. Nothing to re-provision when you switch.
  • Ingest ceiling. 9,000 kbps on the Stream Key plans; 6,000 to 10,000 kbps on the Cloud OBS plans depending on tier.
  • Automatic scene switching. Included with the Stream Key plan for the OBS you run at home, and on every Cloud OBS plan for the one we run for you. It watches the bitrate and cuts to your offline scene before your viewers notice.
  • Your encoder stays yours. A BELABOX box or a phone running Moblin works unchanged: you point it at our host and keep your own hardware.

Bonding makes the drop less likely; it does not make it impossible. What covers the one that happens anyway: Stream failover: staying on air when your connection drops.

Where the receiver lives

The zone is the part of this decision people underestimate. Pick the one closest to where you actually walk around, not the one closest to your viewers — the platform handles distribution, your encoder does not.

  • Ingest zone
  • Cloud OBS region

Ingest zones (RTMP, SRT and SRTLA)

Where your encoder connects. You choose the zone for each stream key, and you can move a key to another zone later.

  • Europe — Frankfurt, Germany
  • Asia — Singapore
  • US East — New York, United States

Cloud OBS region

  • Europe — the only region where Cloud OBS machines run

Cloud OBS runs in Europe only. If you stream from Asia or the United States your video still enters the network in your own zone, and travels from there to the OBS machine in Europe. Worth knowing before you buy.

Connecting BELABOX or Moblin

In Moblin the destination URL has to start with srtla:// rather than srt://, the stream id is publish: followed by your key, and Big packets must be OFF. With it on, the connection fails in a way that reads exactly like a rejected key, and people spend an evening regenerating credentials that were fine.

On a BELABOX encoder you set the receiver host and port from your key page and leave the rest of the profile alone. Either way, test at home on Wi-Fi first, then on cellular alone: if it works on one modem it will work bonded.

Frequently asked questions

What is an SRTLA server?

A receiver that terminates several SRT links from one bonded encoder and reassembles them into a single stream. Your encoder handles the splitting; the server handles the joining. Without one, bonding does nothing: each modem would be an independent, incomplete stream.

Do I need SRTLA if I already stream over SRT?

Only if you use more than one connection at a time. Over a single link, SRT already gives you the retransmission buffer that survives brief drops. SRTLA is what lets you add a second SIM card, or a hotspot on top of the venue Wi-Fi, and have them behave as one uplink.

Can I send SRTLA straight to Twitch or YouTube?

No. The platforms accept RTMP, and some accept plain SRT, but none of them de-bond SRTLA. Something in the middle has to receive the links, reassemble the stream and forward it on — that is exactly what a relay is for.

How much does SRTLA relay hosting cost?

With us it starts at €5/month, on the smallest plan, because SRTLA is included on all of them rather than sold as a bonding upgrade. Self-hosting is the price of a small VPS plus your own time. The managed alternatives sit a long way above both.

Does my BELABOX work with Enhanced IRL?

Yes, unchanged. BELABOX is an open-source project we like, and its encoder speaks standard SRTLA. You keep your hardware and point it at our receiver; nothing about the box needs to change.

What happens when one of my modems dies mid-stream?

SRTLA moves the traffic to the links that are still up, and the stream continues at a lower bitrate if the remaining ones cannot carry the full rate. If everything drops, automatic scene switching cuts to your offline scene and comes back on its own when your signal returns.

Related

Bonded ingest, from €5/month

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