How to Host on Twitch
Did you know that you can grow your Twitch channel and connect with other streamers while you’re not even streaming?
That's the beauty of Twitch’s hosting feature.
Instead of being live and online yourself, you can instead choose another creator’s live stream to run when you’re offline. Your viewers don’t even have to leave your page and chat stream if they don’t want to.
Let’s dive into why hosting is worth your time and how to set up your channel to work for you, even when you’re not working.
Why Host?
Hosting on Twitch is all about spreading awareness to other streamers as well as growing your own community. Twitch even states that it expects to see roughly a 10% increase in minutes watched if just 10 other users decide to auto host a stream.
This is why it’s important to host other channels, it strengthens your community and exposes them to others. Doing so increases the chances that other channels will host your streams in return, bringing in a new audience and hopefully new subscribers to your channel.
It helps you build community without lifting a finger and ensures that your channel is still growing even if you’re not streaming.
How to host on Twitch
Hosting a stream is highly encouraged by Twitch, making it incredibly simple to implement.
That being said, there are some nuances between the desktop and mobile versions that you’ll want to keep in mind.
How to host on desktop
- Go to your channel page (twitch.com/username)
- Type the following in your chat: /host [channel] to host another stream on your channel
You can even switch between hosting different channels up to three times within a 30 minute period. It’s a handy feature if the first channel you happen to be hosting goes offline and you’d like to keep your channel active in the meantime.
How to end host on Twitch
Once you’re done hosting other channels you’ll want to end the stream. This works differently from how you’d end your own stream and involves adding another query within the chat.
Type /unhost in your chat and look for a notification to pop up stating that you have exited host mode. This works across both desktop and mobile and only requires that you add the comment to chat from the same profile view that you started hosting the stream from.
How to host on mobile
- Go to the channel you want to host
- Click the share icon at the top of the stream
- Select Host Channel
Hosting on mobile makes it easy for anyone to host their friends or their favorite channel with just a few taps. Run through this process again to stop hosting.
How to auto host on Twitch
Auto hosting makes this process even simpler. Instead of actively enabling a stream every time you want to host, you can set a pre-approved list of channels to automatically stream at specific times. It’s automatically enabled for partners and is available to any Twitch user, but will only activate once you’ve been offline for at least three minutes.
How to setup auto host:
- Go to your Channel Settings
- Scroll down to Auto Hosting
- Switch to ON
- If you have a Twitch team, switch the Team Hosting setting to ON. This will prioritize hosting members of your Twitch Team.
- If you want to host a specific channel, click the + sign in the top right of the Host List section and type the name of the channel to add. You can choose to host channels randomly or host channels in the order they appear on your list.
- Decide if you want to auto host similar channels with Twitch’s algorithm to host channels that have overlapping viewership.
- Click Save Changes.
Setting up auto hosting is a great way to keep your channel up and running without having to actively manage it. And there are plenty of settings available to personalize exactly who you want appearing on your channel.
Keep growing your channel by hosting
Hosting is what sets Twitch apart from other live streaming platforms. It helps build your community even when you can’t be online yourself and encourages your audience to overlap with others.
If you’re just starting out your streaming career or haven’t set up hosting just yet, make that your next step. It’s an easy way to grow and can help you develop relationships or partnerships with other streamers. The more you help out others, the more they’ll help you out so make sure that you set up hosting as soon as possible.
