Four terms that sound alike
- Metered — you pay per gigabyte or terabyte transferred. Hyperscale clouds typically bill outbound traffic at $0.05–0.09 per GB.
- 95th percentile — you pay for your peak usage after discarding the top 5% of samples; common for transit contracts.
- “Unlimited” with fair use — traffic is not billed, but a vague policy lets the host throttle heavy users.
- Unmetered — traffic is not counted at all; the only limit is the speed of your port.
Our servers are unmetered in the strict sense: no counter, no ratio and no fair-use clause, in either direction.
What a port can move
A 1 Gbps port running flat out transfers 125 MB every second — about 10.8 TB a day and 324 TB in 30 days. A 10 Gbps port moves ten times that: roughly 3.24 PB a month.
At typical cloud egress prices, 324 TB would cost somewhere between $16,000 and $29,000. On an unmetered port it costs nothing beyond the server itself.
What still limits throughput
- Distance. A single TCP connection carries at most its window divided by the round-trip time. Distant clients need larger buffers — or several connections.
- The other side. A home connection or a busy remote server caps what one transfer can reach, whatever your port speed.
- Your disks and CPU. Serving 10 Gbps of small files from spinning disks will not work; NVMe and memory caches will.
How to test it
Measure with several parallel streams to a well-connected endpoint, for example iperf3 -P 8. A single stream to a distant server measures the path, not the port. Our 10 Gbps tuning guide covers the kernel settings that matter.