Hosted Digital Signage Platform: ScreenTinker in the Cloud

You sign in, pair your screens, and start scheduling. There is no server to provision, no software to install, and no updates to apply. We run the platform; you run your screens.

What "hosted" actually means here

ScreenTinker is a digital signage CMS you can run yourself. The hosted version is that same product, running on our infrastructure instead of yours. You get an account at screentinker.com and everything else works the same way it would on your own server.

What changes is who does the operations work:

• Nothing to install. No Linux box, no Docker, no reverse proxy, no TLS certificate to obtain and renew.
• No server to maintain. No OS patching, no disk to watch, no service to restart at an awkward hour.
• No updates to apply. New versions arrive on the hosted platform without you scheduling an upgrade window.
• Backups are ours to worry about. Your content and playlists are backed up as part of running the platform, rather than being a job on your calendar.
• Uptime is our responsibility. Keeping the service reachable is our job, not something you get paged for.

What you still control

Hosting changes where the server lives, not what you can do with it. The dashboard, the players, the scheduling, the layouts, the widgets and the API are the same:

• The same players: Android and Fire TV, Samsung Tizen, LG webOS, BrightSign, Raspberry Pi, and any browser.
• The same content tools: playlists, layouts and zones, dayparting, video walls, and the widget set.
• The same API and the same exports, so your data is never trapped.
• The same software underneath, which is open source and MIT licensed.

It is the same software, and self-hosting stays free

This is worth saying plainly, because a lot of products in this category use a free tier as bait for a paid one. ScreenTinker does not have a hosted-only feature list. The code is MIT licensed, the whole thing is on GitHub, and self-hosting it is free and stays free.

You are not paying for capability. You are paying for somebody else to run the server, and that is the entire difference. If you would rather run it yourself, you lose nothing but the convenience.

Should you self-host instead?

Often, yes. Self-hosting is genuinely the better answer when:

• Your data cannot leave your network. Some environments simply will not allow a third party to hold the content. Self-hosting settles that question completely.
• You already run servers. If you have infrastructure and someone who maintains it, adding one more service is a small marginal cost.
• Your screens are on an isolated network. Signage that must keep working without an internet connection belongs on a server that lives alongside it.
• Your screen count is large. Past a certain fleet size, running your own server is usually cheaper than paying per screen.

The honest version: hosted is the right call when you do not have, or do not want, the operational capacity to run a server. Self-hosting is the right call when you do. Neither is the "real" product.

If that sounds like you, the complete self-hosted digital signage guide covers the hardware, the deployment, the reverse proxy and TLS, running it as a service, and backups.

Hosted vs self-hosted at a glance

Moving between the two

Because it is the same software, the decision is not permanent. You can start hosted while you work out whether signage is going to stick, and move to your own server later. You can also run a self-hosted instance first and move to hosted when maintaining it stops being a good use of anyone's time. Your content, playlists and schedules come with you.

Who hosted suits

• Businesses with screens but no IT team, or an IT team with a full queue already.
• Anyone who wants signage running this afternoon rather than after a deployment project.
• Multi-site operators who would otherwise have to run a server per location or expose one to the internet themselves.
• Anyone evaluating the product who does not want to build infrastructure to do it.