Unmetered bandwidth means the host doesn’t count your bytes: you pay a flat price for a port, and the port speed is your only limit. Metered means you buy a monthly allowance in terabytes, and going past it costs you. Which one is cheaper comes down to a number most buyers never work out, their average rate in megabits per second, so that’s where we’ll start.
Four billing models, in plain terms
Hosting bandwidth gets sold four ways. The names get blurred, sometimes on purpose.
Metered (a transfer cap). You get a monthly allowance, say 30 TB, counted in bytes. Go over and you pay per TB, get throttled or get pushed to a bigger plan. Fine for modest, predictable traffic.
95th percentile (burstable). The host bills your rate, not your volume. More on this below, because it catches people.
Unmetered. A flat monthly price for a port of a given speed, usually 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps. Nobody counts bytes. The port is the ceiling.
“Unlimited.” A marketing word. Sometimes it means unmetered, and sometimes it means metered with the meter hidden in an acceptable use policy that kicks in at “excessive” use. Ask for the port speed and the throttling threshold in writing. No answer means there’s a cap you haven’t found yet.
The conversion you need: TB per month to Mbps
Everything here uses decimal units (1 TB = 10¹² bytes) and a 30-day month, which is 2,592,000 seconds.
Two shortcuts cover almost every sizing question:
- Average Mbps ≈ TB per month × 3.09
- TB per month ≈ average Mbps × 0.324
So a 30 TB allowance is the same as running about 93 Mbps around the clock. A 1 Gbps port run flat out for 30 days moves 324 TB in each direction. A 10 Gbps port moves 3,240 TB, about 3.2 PB.
| What you’re buying | Data per 30-day month (one direction) | Average rate it implies | Share of a 1 Gbps port, 24/7 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 TB metered | 10 TB | 30.9 Mbps | 3.1% |
| 30 TB metered | 30 TB | 92.6 Mbps | 9.3% |
| 50 TB metered | 50 TB | 154.3 Mbps | 15.4% |
| 100 TB metered | 100 TB | 308.6 Mbps | 30.9% |
| 150 TB metered | 150 TB | 463.0 Mbps | 46.3% |
| 1 Gbps unmetered | up to 324 TB | up to 1,000 Mbps | 100% |
| 10 Gbps unmetered | up to 3,240 TB (3.24 PB) | up to 10,000 Mbps | 1,000% |
Those are line-rate ceilings. TCP over a standard 1,500-byte MTU loses roughly 6% to Ethernet and IP headers, so a 1 Gbps port that’s busy all month realistically moves about 305 TB.
Now the part the table hides. Averages lie about capacity.
A server that moves 30 TB a month might sit at 20 Mbps overnight and hit 400 Mbps every evening, and while your allowance only cares about the monthly total, your users only feel the evening peak. You need both numbers, from your host’s port graphs or a couple of weeks of vnstat.
95th percentile, with a worked example
Burstable billing samples your port every five minutes, sorts the month’s samples, throws away the top 5% and bills you at the highest one left. Wikipedia’s burstable billing entry and Kentik’s guide to 95th percentile billing both walk through it. A 30-day month has 8,640 five-minute samples, so 432 get discarded. That’s 36 hours of free peaks.
Take a server that idles around 60 Mbps, climbs to 250 Mbps most evenings and runs a nightly offsite backup at 800 Mbps.
If the backup takes one hour a night, that’s 30 hours a month at 800 Mbps. All 30 hours fall inside the discarded 36, so the bill lands around 250 Mbps, your evening peak.
Now let the backup grow to two hours a night. That’s 60 hours at 800 Mbps, and only 36 of them get thrown out. The other 24 hours still sit at the top of the sorted list, so you’re billed at 800 Mbps. One extra hour a night more than tripled the billable rate.
That cliff is the whole story of burstable billing. It’s kind to rare spikes and harsh on anything that runs on a schedule. Also ask whether the host bills the higher of inbound and outbound per sample or adds them together.
When 1 Gbps unmetered is enough
For most single servers, it is.
My rule: size the port to your 95th percentile, not your average, and keep about a third of it free. That puts the practical limit for 1 Gbps somewhere around 600 to 700 Mbps at the 95th. Above that, evening peaks start pressing against the port, and TCP flows slow each other down long before anything logs an error. If you’re at 150 Mbps average and 400 Mbps at the 95th, a gigabit is plenty, and the only real question is whether unmetered costs less than a TB plan that covers you.
Here’s how that plays out on our own order form. A standard Chicago or Los Angeles dedicated server starts at $126 a month with 30 TB of transfer, and the transfer line is a $20 slot you can change. The form offers 50 TB for $60, 100 TB for $160 and 150 TB for $260, or a 1 Gbps unmetered uplink for $320 in that same slot. If you’re anywhere near 150 TB, the $60 gap between the top tier and the unmetered uplink buys you more than double the ceiling, and the byte count stops mattering.
The cheaper way into 1 Gbps unmetered is the $159 Xeon D-1541 build on our current specials page. It comes with 64 GB of RAM, a 1 TB SSD and a 1 Gbps unmetered port, month to month with $0 setup, in Ashburn, Chicago or Los Angeles. If that hardware fits your workload, it’s the least you’ll pay us for an unmetered port.
When 10 Gbps is worth it
Move up when your 95th percentile runs above about 700 Mbps, or when your graph has a flat top. A flat top means demand was higher than the port, and you never got to see how much higher.
The other case is bulk transfer on a deadline. An 8 TB nightly replication takes almost 18 hours at a full 1 Gbps. At 10 Gbps it’s under two. When a job has a window, the port speed matters more than your monthly total.
Our 10 Gbps unmetered servers start at $499 a month on the current promotion (MSRP $599), with dual Xeon E5-2670 v2 CPUs, 64 GB of RAM and two 1 TB SSDs. That’s $340 a month more than the 1 Gbps special, on different hardware, for ten times the port. If your traffic fits in a gigabit with room to spare, don’t pay for the other nine. Our 10 Gbps unmetered explainer covers which workloads need it and the traps specific to 10G offers.
What “unmetered” doesn’t promise
Unmetered is a billing term. It tells you nobody’s counting, and nothing about what you’ll get through the pipe at 9 p.m. on a Friday.
A port speed is a ceiling, not a guaranteed rate. Your server’s link runs to an access switch, and that switch shares its uplinks with the other servers in the rack. That’s true at any host selling 1 and 10 Gbps ports, us included. What differs is how carefully the host manages it. At GigeNET we watch each rack’s uplink load and add capacity or stop selling into that rack before it gets tight. If you need a guaranteed rate rather than a well-managed shared one, say so on the quote form and we’ll tell you plainly what we can commit to.
Past the switch, the remote end’s connection and TCP over long round trips cap you too. A single download stream from Los Angeles to a user in Virginia won’t fill a 10 Gbps port, no matter who hosts the server.
Questions to ask any unmetered host
Get these answered in writing before you order:
- Is the port unmetered in both directions, at full port speed, all month?
- Is there a commit, a burst rate or a 95th percentile charge anywhere in the contract?
- Does the AUP mention “fair use”, “sustained” or “excessive” traffic, and what’s the actual number?
- How are the access switch uplinks sized, and what happens when a rack gets busy?
- Can I buy a guaranteed rate, and what does it cost?
- Can I test the network before I pay?
That last one is easy to check with us. Our looking glass runs ping, traceroute, MTR and iperf from Chicago, Los Angeles and Ashburn, and each site has a 1 GB test file: speedtest.chi.gigenet.com/1gb.img, speedtest.lax.gigenet.com/1gb.img and speedtest.iad.gigenet.com/1gb.img. One stream tells you little about a fast port, so run several at once:
for i in $(seq 8); do curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{speed_download}\n" http://speedtest.chi.gigenet.com/1gb.img & done; wait
Add up the eight results (they’re in bytes per second) and multiply by 8 for your aggregate rate in bits.
FAQ
Up to 324 TB in each direction in a 30-day month at full line rate, counting decimal terabytes. After protocol overhead, about 305 TB is a realistic ceiling. Few servers sustain that. You’re paying for room for your peaks.
Because that’s what 1 Gbps is. Port speeds are quoted in bits and file transfers show bytes, so 1 Gbps is 125 MB/s at line rate, and TCP over a 1,500-byte MTU delivers about 941 Mbps of it, roughly 117 MB/s. If you’re seeing much less, test with parallel streams and check the route with MTR.
It depends on the contract. Hosts may bill per TB over, throttle the port or move you up a tier, and overage is often the priciest bandwidth on the invoice. On our metered plans, ask for the current overage rate before you order, and if you’re close to your tier, step up a tier or move to an unmetered port instead.
No. Unmetered changes how traffic is billed, not what’s allowed on the network. The host’s acceptable use policy still applies, so spam or attack traffic will get a server shut off whatever the port plan says.
Not sure which side of the line you’re on? Send a month of port graphs through our custom quote form and we’ll tell you whether a TB plan, 1 Gbps unmetered or 10 Gbps fits your traffic.