Host Your Own Secure Video Calls at Home: A Private Server for Family and Friends
We're all used to reaching for a third-party app to call friends and family: Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc. Almost nobody wants to complicate their life by running their own server, and if you mention "spinning up a WebRTC media server" to an experienced sysadmin, they'll probably put their head in their hands thinking about how complicated it must be.
In reality, it's much easier than you might think. At OpenVidu we've worked hard to make a self-hosted video conferencing service as easy to install and run as possible, and hosting it yourself comes with some genuine advantages. It's completely free, there are no 40-minute timers or participant limits, your guests join straight from a browser with no account and no app, and every call stays on hardware that lives in your own home.
With a tiny computer like a Raspberry Pi, an old laptop or a mini-PC, you can have your own private video conferencing server running in a matter of minutes. This guide walks you through it in three simple steps using OpenVidu Meet.
