ChirpStack HostingFully Managed

It means you get the full functionality of your own LoRaWAN Network Server without having to deal with IT administration. We handle architecture, installation, gateway connection, security updates, backups and 24/7 monitoring. You use ChirpStack as productive infrastructure while merkaio operates the engine room.

TTN is great for communities but has limits (Fair Use Policy) and shared resources. Managed ChirpStack at merkaio offers you guaranteed resources, no artificial limits on uplinks/downlinks and complete data sovereignty. It's the enterprise alternative for business-critical applications where you need control over the network and SLA availability.

No. This is a core promise of merkaio. Since we use 100% open-source software, the data and configurations belong to you. You can request a complete database dump (PostgreSQL & Redis) at any time and move your instance to another provider or your own servers. We retain customers through service quality, not proprietary code.

Yes. ChirpStack supports multi-tenancy out of the box. We can configure your instance to allow multiple organizations or application users. This is ideal if you're a service provider offering IoT solutions to different end customers and need to logically separate data streams.

Our infrastructure is hardware-agnostic. We support any gateway that can use the Semtech Packet Forwarder or ChirpStack Gateway Bridge. We have particularly deep experience and automated provisioning templates for Milesight gateways. We also support hardware from Mikrotik, Kerlink, Dragino, MultiTech or RAK Wireless.

We don't rely on open ports. We implement secured connections, typically via MQTTS (TLS/SSL) or dedicated VPN tunnels (e.g., WireGuard). This means the management interfaces of the gateways are not publicly visible on the internet, drastically reducing the attack surface.

Yes. Since we have full control over the chirpstack-network-server configuration, we can support any frequency plan defined by the LoRa Alliance. We can provision instances for any frequency region: Europe (EU868), USA (US915), Asia (AS923), or mixed environments within a single instance if you operate globally.

ChirpStack offers flexible integration options that we configure for you. The most common routes are MQTT (for real-time data), HTTP webhooks (for REST APIs) or direct integrations into InfluxDB or PostgreSQL. We ensure the data arrives securely where you want to process it.

Yes, this is a standard scenario at merkaio. We configure ChirpStack so that decoded payloads are written to a time-series database (e.g., Prometheus or InfluxDB), which Grafana then accesses. This gives you real-time visualizations of your sensor data without detours.

By default, we host our managed instances in data centers in Germany or the EU (e.g., Frankfurt/Nuremberg) to ensure full GDPR compliance. On request (e.g., for international latency optimization), we can also deploy your instance in other regions. You decide on the data location.

merkaio handles this completely. Outdated IoT servers are a security risk. We test new versions in staging environments and roll out updates in a controlled manner, often without downtime, to your production environment. We also handle updates to the underlying databases (PostgreSQL/Redis) and the operating system.

Very scalable. For small setups, we use efficient single-instance deployments. As your network grows, we seamlessly migrate to cluster architectures (e.g., Kubernetes), where network server, application server and databases run on separate nodes and handle load spikes via load balancers.

We perform daily automated backups of your configurations and databases, which are encrypted and stored externally. In case of a critical failure, we can restore the entire environment within a very short time (defined in the SLA) - this is disaster recovery.

Yes. For migration from a self-hosted ChirpStack, we can often import the databases directly (lift & shift). For TTN migration, we support you in re-registering devices or (if you have the root keys) migrating via script. We advise you on the best migration path.

Unlike many SaaS platforms that charge per message or per device and become expensive at scale, we use infrastructure pricing. You pay for the managed instance provided (size S/M/L) and the service level. This makes costs predictable and fair as your sensor network grows.