Looking for advice on low-cost HLS streaming setup (single server + Cloudflare)

Hi everyone,
I’m currently running a video website with:

• 3,000+ videos already uploaded
• planning to scale to 20,000–30,000+ videos
• around 15,000–20,000 daily visitors from Google search

Now I’m trying to build the most cost-efficient infrastructure possible.

My plan is:

• use a single origin server
• serve videos as HLS (.m3u8 + small .ts segments)
• put Cloudflare in front
• rely on Cloudflare to cache the small video segments, so the origin server bandwidth and load stay as low as possible

I’m not looking for enterprise or expensive solutions — I want the cheapest practical setup that actually works at this scale.

What I’m looking for:

1. Server recommendations
   • Providers with good price/performance (storage + bandwidth)
   • Dedicated vs VPS for this use case
   • Suggested specs for handling this scale
2. Setup advice
   • Best way to serve HLS behind Cloudflare
   • Any pitfalls with caching .m3u8 vs .ts files
   • Cache rules / headers that work well in practice
3. Low-budget scaling path
   • If I start with one server, what should be the next step later?
   • Add more storage?
   • Separate encoding server?
   • Move to object storage?

If anyone is running a similar setup (single origin + Cloudflare + HLS) at scale, I’d really appreciate real-world advice, provider suggestions, and things to avoid.


Thanks in advance.

Also, to give more context:

I’m currently using a third-party video hosting service, but it comes with several limitations that are starting to affect my growth:

• They inject ads into the video player
• Some users experience buffering/freezing issues
• I have to upload videos as full .mp4 files (no segmentation)
• There are no proper player controls (no quality selection, limited UX)
• From an analytics perspective, when users watch videos, it doesn’t properly count as engagement on my site (which negatively affects my Google data)

Because of these limitations, I’m considering moving to my own setup (HLS + Cloudflare + single server) to have full control over performance, monetization, and user experience.