An Almost Free, Open Source TURN Server
Hi HN, I have been messing around with WebRTC for a few years now but when it comes to the TURN server I never quite got to my gold standard of free, self-hosted and open source. I decided to give it a go using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's free tier, meaning that my total spend got down to domain name hosting. I know plenty of people have been burnt by Oracle in the past, but I have had servers running on the free tier for 5 years now without so much as a hiccup. Regardless, the concepts will be the same using any cloud based server. This is the first time I've written up an end-to-end…
An Almost Free, Open Source TURN Server launched on March 28, 2025 with 122 votes, #368 of 7,215 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
This is an open-source TURN server implementation designed for WebRTC applications. It runs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's free tier, requiring only domain name hosting costs. The project is self-hosted and open source, addressing the developer's goal of creating a free alternative to commercial TURN servers. It includes end-to-end setup documentation targeting developers with basic networking, Linux, and web development knowledge.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Peer to peer video chat, file sharing etc. Contribute to lvidgen/WebRTC development by creating an account on GitHub.
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, I have been messing around with WebRTC for a few years now but when it comes to the TURN server I never quite got to my gold standard of free, self-hosted and open source. I decided to give it a go using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's free tier, meaning that my total spend got down to domain name hosting. I…
Does a similar job
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Hey HN! I’ve written a bunch of WebSocket servers over the years to do simple things like state synchronization, WebRTC signaling, and notifying a client when a backend job was run. I realized that if I had a simple way to create a private, temporary, mini-redis that the client could talk to directly, it would save a lot of time. So we created DriftDB. In addition to the open source server that you can run yourself, we also provide https://jamsocket.live where you can use an instance we host on Cloudflare’s edge (~13ms round trip latency from my home in NY). You may have seen my…
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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
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