Unmetered bandwidth explained: what a 1 Gbps port really gives you

“Unmetered” is one of the most useful words in a server listing, and one of the least explained. It does not mean infinite traffic. It means the traffic on your port is not counted or billed by the gigabyte, so the only ceiling is the port speed itself. Here is what that ceiling works out to, how it compares with other billing models, and how to tell whether you need 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps.

The math: from 1 Gbps to 324 TB

Network speeds are quoted in bits, storage in bytes, and a byte is 8 bits:

1 Gbps = 1,000,000,000 bit/s ÷ 8 = 125,000,000 byte/s = 125 MB/s = 0.125 GB/s

A 30-day month has 30 × 24 × 3,600 = 2,592,000 seconds. At 100% utilization:

0.125 GB/s × 2,592,000 s = 324,000 GB ≈ 324 TB per direction

Ethernet is full duplex, so that is up to 324 TB out and another 324 TB in, at the same time. A 10 Gbps port moves ten times as much: about 3.24 PB per direction. These are decimal units; tools that count in binary units will show 324 TB as roughly 295 TiB.

What you actually get: goodput and distance

A 1 Gbps link never delivers 125 MB/s of application data. Each full 1,500-byte packet spends 52 bytes on IP and TCP headers (with the usual TCP timestamps), and Ethernet adds 38 bytes of framing and inter-packet gap on the wire. That leaves 1,448 useful bytes out of every 1,538 sent, about 94%. A single clean TCP transfer on 1 GbE therefore tops out around 940 Mbit/s of goodput, about 117 MB/s, which makes a saturated month closer to 305 TB of payload than 324 TB. On 10 GbE, the same overhead leaves about 9.4 Gbit/s.

Distance matters too. TCP can only keep as much data in flight as its window allows, and filling a link takes a window as large as the bandwidth-delay product:

1 Gbit/s × 0.150 s RTT = 150 Mbit ≈ 18.75 MB in flight

A single flow to a user 150 ms away will not fill your port if the socket buffers are smaller than that. Parallel transfers, larger buffers and a modern congestion control algorithm such as BBR help. Check your current settings:

sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control net.ipv4.tcp_rmem net.ipv4.tcp_wmem

Then measure rather than guess, with iperf3 against a host you control. -P 4 runs four parallel streams and -R tests the reverse direction:

iperf3 -c 203.0.113.10 -P 4 -t 30
iperf3 -c 203.0.113.10 -P 4 -t 30 -R

Your port speed is the ceiling. What you reach toward a specific user also depends on the path: their provider, congestion on their side and the round-trip time between you.

Three ways bandwidth gets billed

Per-GB egress

Common on cloud platforms. Every gigabyte leaving your server is billed, inbound traffic is often free, and an allowance is sometimes included. The cost grows in a straight line with traffic, so a viral launch or a popular download shows up directly on the invoice.

95th percentile

Common for colocation and IP transit. The provider samples your port’s throughput every 5 minutes, sorts the month’s samples, discards the top 5% and bills the highest remaining value. A 30-day month has 8,640 five-minute samples, so the top 432, or 36 hours of peaks, are free; sustained peaks beyond that set the bill.

Unmetered port

You pay for the port speed, and traffic is not counted. The bill is the same whether the port idles or runs flat out all month. The trade-off is a hard ceiling: you cannot burst beyond the port speed.

What unmetered means at DediJet

• The full port, 24/7. Every plan includes unmetered bandwidth at its port speed, 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps, around the clock. Traffic on your port is not counted or billed by the gigabyte.
• Within the Acceptable Use Policy. The bandwidth-specific rule is simple: you may not resell it as IP transit. Serving your own sites, streams, game servers, mirrors and backups is exactly what it is for.
• 10 Gbps when you need it. Several servers, such as the EPYC 7443P and EPYC 9354P, include a 10 Gbps port. On 1 Gbps plans, a 10 Gbps upgrade costs $129/mo, also unmetered.
• Attacks filtered upstream. Always-on, network-level DDoS mitigation filters floods before they reach your port, at no extra cost.

The full rules are in our Acceptable Use Policy.

Sizing examples

Start from your monthly volume, then look at your peaks. Spread evenly over 30 days, common volumes need these average rates:

Averages hide peaks, so size the port for your busiest hour, not for the monthly total.

Video streaming

A 1080p stream typically runs at 5–8 Mbit/s per viewer, depending on codec and encoder settings. With about 940 Mbit/s of usable throughput, 940 ÷ 8 ≈ 117 and 940 ÷ 5 = 188: a 1 Gbps port serves roughly 120–190 concurrent 1080p viewers at full load, and a 10 Gbps port about ten times that. Leave headroom for peaks. A CDN in front of your origin changes the math entirely.

Game servers

Game traffic is small next to video: per-player rates range from kilobits to a few megabits per second, depending on the game, tick rate and view distance. A game server usually runs out of CPU long before a 1 Gbps port fills up. The exceptions are downloads, such as mods, maps and resource packs sent to joining players, and patch days.

Backups and restores

Here the question is time, not volume. A 2 TB nightly backup that must finish within 6 hours needs 2,000 GB × 8 ÷ 21,600 s ≈ 741 Mbit/s sustained. That fits a 1 Gbps port, with little headroom. Incremental tools such as BorgBackup or restic shrink the nightly volume. A full restore of 10 TB at about 117 MB/s takes roughly 24 hours on 1 Gbps, and about 2.4 hours on 10 Gbps if your disks keep up. For copies off the server, our backup space add-on starts at 1 TB for $5/mo.

When to upgrade to 10 Gbps

• Your busiest hour regularly approaches the ~940 Mbit/s goodput ceiling.
• You stream to more concurrent viewers than one 1 Gbps port carries.
• Restores or migrations must finish in hours rather than a day.
• You serve large files, such as game patches, ISO images or datasets, to many users at once.
• You replicate large volumes between servers or locations.

Before paying for 10 Gbps, check that the rest of the machine can keep up. NVMe drives can feed a 10 Gbps port; a handful of hard drives may not, and a single TCP flow over a long distance will not fill it without tuning.

Choosing your port

If your peak hour stays well below the ~940 Mbit/s goodput ceiling, a 1 Gbps unmetered port is all you need, and your bill will not move with your traffic. Streaming platforms, download mirrors and backup targets are where 10 Gbps earns its price. Compare port speeds across the catalog on the comparison page, find the upgrade on the add-ons page, and see how traffic is handled on our network page. For video workloads, our streaming page goes further.