A self-hosted Jitsi Meet server, sized network first

What Jitsi needs, in Jitsi's order

The network figures are for the videobridge, the component that carries the media; the CPU, RAM and disk figures are for the Jitsi Meet server as a whole. Prosody, the XMPP server that handles signalling, is single-threaded, so a few fast cores do more for it than many slow ones.

Sizing the port

Jitsi Videobridge is a Selective Forwarding Unit: it does not mix video, it forwards each participant's stream to the others. The handbook's approximate bitrates are 200 kbit/s at 180p, 500 kbit/s at 360p, 2,500 kbit/s at 720p and 10 Mbit/s at 4K.

Those are ceilings, every participant receiving every other in HD; real calls send less. They still show where a 1 Gbit/s port runs out and why the handbook points serious deployments at 10 Gbit/s. On unmetered dedicated servers the port carries your traffic alone and nothing counts the gigabytes, so a busy week of meetings changes nothing on the invoice. The port can be upgraded to 10 Gbps when the meetings outgrow it.

Installing on Ubuntu

1. Point a DNS A record, such as meet.example.org, at the server. Let's Encrypt needs it.
2. Open the firewall ports Jitsi lists: 80 for the certificate, 443 for the web app, 10000/udp for media, 22 for SSH, 5349/tcp for the TURN fallback, and 3478/udp if you enable STUN.
3. Enable the universe repository, add the Prosody and Jitsi package repositories, and install jitsi-meet. Jitsi requires OpenJDK 17.
4. When the installer asks, give the hostname and choose the Let's Encrypt certificate. Jitsi's mobile apps need a certificate from a trusted authority, so a self-signed one is a dead end.

sudo ufw allow 22/tcp
sudo ufw allow 80/tcp
sudo ufw allow 443/tcp
sudo ufw allow 10000/udp
sudo ufw allow 3478/udp
sudo ufw allow 5349/tcp
sudo ufw enable

sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt update
sudo apt install apt-transport-https
sudo curl -sL https://prosody.im/files/prosody-debian-packages.key -o /usr/share/keyrings/prosody-debian-packages.key
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/prosody-debian-packages.key] http://packages.prosody.im/debian $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/prosody-debian-packages.list
curl -sL https://download.jitsi.org/jitsi-key.gpg.key | sudo sh -c 'gpg --dearmor > /usr/share/keyrings/jitsi-keyring.gpg'
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/jitsi-keyring.gpg] https://download.jitsi.org stable/" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jitsi-stable.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install jitsi-meet

Jitsi supports Ubuntu 24.04 or newer and Debian 12 or newer. Beyond 100 participants, the handbook raises the systemd limits DefaultLimitNOFILE, DefaultLimitNPROC and DefaultTasksMax to 65000.

Closing it to strangers

Out of the box, the handbook says, anyone who reaches the server can start a meeting and talk to anyone else. Room passwords protect one room after it exists; they do not stop someone creating rooms on your bridge and spending your bandwidth.

Restrict who may create meetings with authentication. The handbook's older 'secure domain' method, Prosody accounts with a guest domain for invitees, is marked as not for new installations, and the handbook points new deployments to JWT token authentication instead.

Why a whole machine

On a single-tenant machine no neighbour's burst shares the cores or the port, and the port is yours alone at the switch. One IPv4 address is included, IPv6 can be added free at checkout on most lines, and the videobridge needs a public address for UDP 10000 without NAT to work around.

A machine already on the shelf is delivered about 30 minutes after the order is approved; a build to order takes 4 to 24 hours. Pick the city nearest the people meeting, New York, Miami, San Francisco, Amsterdam or Bucharest, because round-trip time is felt in every conversation.

Recording and when to stop scaling up

For recording, the handbook says Jibri needs one system per recording, with RAM, CPU and disk needs far higher than Jitsi Meet itself: at least 8 GB of RAM to record at 1080x720. Put it on its own machine, not on the bridge.

Past one bridge's capacity, Jitsi can add more videobridges, and the network then matters on each of them. For a few meetings a week, a hosted service is cheaper than any server.