10Gbps dedicated servers: unmetered, full duplex, from $499 a month

Three Chicago builds, all on a 10 Gbps full-duplex unmetered port. Pick the RAM and IP count that fit, or ask for a custom configuration.

In-stock builds are online the same day or the next, and custom builds take a week or less. Every server includes 4 Gbps of DDoS protection, with 6, 8 or 10 Gbps available on the order form. The 10 Gbps packages are Chicago only; for a gigabit in Ashburn, Chicago or Los Angeles, see our unmetered dedicated servers.

A metered plan sells you terabytes. An unmetered port sells you the pipe and lets you fill it. Here’s what each one can move in a 30-day month:

For streaming, size the port by bitrate times concurrent viewers. A 6 Mbps stream to 160 viewers is 960 Mbps, which fills a gigabit. A 10 Gbps port carries about ten times that, so roughly 1,600 viewers at the same bitrate.

Most workloads never hold 10 Gbps for a whole month. What it buys is headroom, so a launch day, a patch release or a viral clip doesn’t hit a wall. If your graphs sit under 600 or 700 Mbps at peak, start on 1 Gbps and move up when they don’t. More in 10 Gbps unmetered servers: what you are actually buying.

No cap, no overage, no throttling. We don’t meter the port in either direction, and the 10 Gbps ports are full duplex, so you can push 10 Gbps out while you pull 10 Gbps in.

Port size, not a committed rate. At any host selling 1 and 10 Gbps ports, switch uplinks are shared, ours included. We watch each rack’s uplink load and add capacity, or stop selling into that rack, before it gets tight. If you need a committed rate, say so on the quote form and we’ll tell you plainly what we can commit to.

Test it first. Run ping, traceroute or MTR from our looking glass at lg.gigenet.com, or pull the 1 GB test file from speedtest.chi.gigenet.com. One stream won’t fill a 10 Gbps port, so run several at once.