22 years of web hosting experience. Enterprise-grade infrastructure. A gap in the market that StreamElements and Streamlabs don't fill. And a streamer who needed to solve his own problem.
When you watch a Twitch VOD, you see everything: viewer count, chat messages, follower alerts, the stream title. Context that tells the story of that stream.
When you watch your local OBS recording? Nothing. Just the gameplay. No idea if anyone was watching. No record of the chat banter. No way to know which moments your audience loved.
StreamElements and Streamlabs build incredible tools for the live experience. But they don't solve the recording problem. Your local files remain context-free.
I stream on a Mac. I record in 4K. I needed widgets that captured Twitch data directly into my OBS recordings. So I built them.
Viewer count, uptime, followers — baked into your local recording file, not just the Twitch VOD.
Real-time chat feed captured in your recording. Review viewer reactions when editing highlights.
You control your own Twitch API keys. AES-256 encrypted. Rotate anytime. No middleman.
Started a web hosting company as a side venture. Learned the hard way what uptime really means when clients are counting on you 24/7.
DNS, email, databases, web servers, client support. Learned what breaks at 3am and how to make sure it doesn't. Built systems that just work.
Quietly rebuilt everything. New servers, faster networks, modern virtualisation. Preparing the platform for whatever came next.
Netgate pfSense gateways deployed. Gigabit connectivity. Geographically dispersed DNS with DNSSEC. Enterprise-grade infrastructure, home office economics.
After decades balancing hosting with a demanding career, finally dedicating full time to building tools for streamers. Started streaming on a Mac Studio M2 Ultra. The tools I needed didn't exist. Had the infrastructure to build them. So I did.
This isn't a side project on a £5/month VPS. It's built on infrastructure designed for commercial web hosting.
Multiple HestiaCP instances on VMware Fusion, backed by a Mac Studio M2 Ultra with 128GB unified memory. Tuned Apache and PHP-FPM for high concurrency.
PowerDNS authoritative servers at multiple physical sites. DNSSEC signed. Because nobody else was doing it properly.
Netgate pfSense gateways with optimised state tables. AES-256 encryption at rest. Proper network segmentation.
Virgin Business 1Gbps. More than enough headroom for thousands of concurrent API responses.
Growth is a nice problem to have. Here's exactly how we stay ahead of it — no surprises, no scrambling, no degraded service.
Registration cap: 3,000
Registration cap: 8,000
Registration cap: 20,000
Registration cap: Open
Each phase has a registration cap — not because we can't handle more, but because we won't let growth outpace infrastructure. When we approach a cap, registrations pause, we implement the next phase, then we raise the cap. No user ever experiences degraded service.
Phase 1 (Now) — Up to 3,000 concurrent streamers ┌──────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ │ Streamer │─────▶│ Hestia VM │─────▶│ Twitch API │ │ Widget │ │ (Tuned) │ │ (per-user) │ └──────────────┘ └──────────────┘ └──────────────┘ Phase 2-3 (Growth) — Up to 20,000 concurrent streamers ┌──────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ │ Streamer │ │ Hestia VM 1 │──┐ │ Widget │─────▶│──────────────│ │ ┌──────────────┐ └──────────────┘ │ Hestia VM 2 │──┼──▶│ Twitch API │ │ │──────────────│ │ └──────────────┘ │ │ Hestia VM 3 │──┘ │ └──────────────┘ │ │ │ ┌──────────────┐ └────────────▶│ Redis │ (shared sessions/cache) └──────────────┘ Phase 4 (Unlimited) — Effectively no ceiling ┌──────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ │ Streamer │───────────────────────▶│ Twitch API │ │ Widget │ (direct browser call) │ (per-user) │ └──────────────┘ └──────────────┘ │ │ (auth only, rare) ▼ ┌──────────────┐ │ Hestia VM │ └──────────────┘
Because the infrastructure already exists and is paid for. Adding users is just rows in a database.
Because I built this to solve my own problem first. Sharing it costs me almost nothing.
Because the real value is in the community. Watch the streams, subscribe if you find them useful, share the tools with other Mac streamers. That's the business model.
StreamElements is free too. They make money on tips and premium features. I make content. Different model, same result: you get useful tools at no cost.
| Feature | StreamElements | e-businesshosting |
|---|---|---|
| Live stream overlays | ✓ | ✓ |
| Alerts & notifications | ✓ | — |
| Tip jar & donations | ✓ | — |
| Stats captured in local recording | ✗ | ✓ |
| Chat captured in local recording | ✗ | ✓ |
| Your own API credentials | ✗ | ✓ |
| Works when Twitch deletes VOD | ✗ | ✓ |
We're not replacing StreamElements — we're filling the gap they left.
Create an account, connect your Twitch API credentials, and get widget URLs for OBS in under 5 minutes.