What is Remote MCP server?

A remote MCP server is one you reach over the network at a URL rather than launching as a local subprocess. It runs as a hosted service, speaks Streamable HTTP, and typically authenticates with OAuth so each user grants their own access without copying tokens into a file. The advantages over local stdio are operational: there is nothing to install, the server is always on, it can be maintained and updated centrally, and a whole team can point at the same endpoint. That makes remote servers the natural choice for SaaS integrations, official servers from companies like GitHub, Notion, Linear, and Stripe publish remote endpoints, and for any capability a team wants to share rather than reinstall per laptop. The trade-off is that you depend on the host's uptime and trust its handling of your data, so for sensitive systems some teams still prefer a self-hosted or local server.