Last updated: 2026-07-10
Cross-network transfers and stored links use relay bandwidth and disk that cost us money, so they run on a free allowance and are paid past it. There's a way around that: run your own relay/storage node, bind it to your account, and your transfers flow through your node instead of ours — nothing metered, nothing billed.
This is different from self-hosting the whole Relayium server. You keep using your normal relayium.com account and the same apps; you're just adding a node you own to carry your traffic. This guide takes you from a fresh Linux box to an online node in about five minutes.
Two reasons. First, cost: a node you own carries your relay and storage traffic directly, so it never touches our metered infrastructure and there is nothing to bill — your usage is free no matter how large.
Second, control: the relayed bytes and stored blobs live on hardware you run, under your own operational control. Realtime transfers stay end-to-end encrypted the whole way, so even your own node only ever sees ciphertext.
A Linux server reachable from the internet — a cheap VPS or an always-on box at home both work. You'll need root (or sudo), and the ability to open a few inbound ports. Both amd64 and arm64 are supported.
Sign in at relayium.com, open the account page (/me), scroll to My Nodes, and click Add node. You'll get a one-time install command with a token baked in — the token is shown only once, so copy it right away. It looks like this:
curl -fsSL https://relayium.com/install-node.sh | sudo RELAYIUM_CENTRAL_URL=https://relayium.com RELAYIUM_NODE_TOKEN=<your-token> RELAYIUM_NODE_STORAGE_DIR=/var/lib/relayium-node/blobs shPaste the command on your server. It pipes our installer into sh: the installer downloads and checksum-verifies the relayium-node binary, installs it to /usr/local/bin, writes a systemd service, and starts it. The leading sudo is why it can install the service; if you're already root it's a harmless no-op.
Because it's a systemd service, the node is enabled on boot and restarts itself if it ever crashes — it stays online across reboots with nothing more to do. If you see `relayium-node: command not found`, you ran the binary directly instead of the installer above — the one-line command is what puts the binary in place.
Being online (a heartbeat to relayium.com) only needs outbound access, which you already have. But for peers to actually relay through and store on your node, its inbound ports must be reachable. If the host runs a firewall, open them — with ufw that's:
sudo ufw allow 3478/udp # TURN
sudo ufw allow 8081/tcp # storage
sudo ufw allow 49152:65535/udp # relayBack on the account page, your node appears under My Nodes and flips to Online within about 30 seconds. From then on your account's transfers prefer your own node automatically.
To force it — never fall back to our shared infrastructure — turn on "Only use my own nodes for relay/storage" on the same page. With that on, if none of your nodes are online a transfer fails rather than quietly using ours.
You ran the relayium-node binary before installing it. Use the one-line install command from the account page (the curl … | sudo … sh form): it downloads the binary, puts it on your PATH, and starts it as a service. You never install relayium-node separately.
Yes. The installer registers a systemd service that is enabled on boot and set to Restart=always, so it comes back after a reboot and restarts itself if it crashes. Nothing extra to run.
Bring-your-own-node keeps your normal relayium.com account and apps and just adds a node you own to carry your traffic. Self-hosting runs the entire server stack (accounts, web app, signaling) on your own domain — see the "Self-host Relayium" guide for that.
No. A node is bound to your account by its token and only carries your account's traffic. Realtime transfers are end-to-end encrypted and stored blobs are ciphertext your node can't read. Your data and node configuration are only ever usable by you.
Sign in, open your account page, and add your first node in under a minute.
Open the account page