How traffic gets billed.
Three models, one without a meter.
A hosting invoice turns traffic into money in one of three ways: a monthly allowance in terabytes, the 95th percentile of your rate, or the size of the port. Here is how each one is counted, with arithmetic you can check on paper, and where each one bites.
- 1 Gbps
- 324 TB a month
- samples
- 8,640 a month
- 95th pct
- 36 free hours
- ours
- the port, no counter
From gigabits to terabytes.
Ports are sold in bits per second, allowances in bytes per month. Eight bits make a byte and a 30-day month has 2,592,000 seconds, so 1 Gbps at line rate moves 324 terabytes a month. The table below does the sum for every port we sell.
Line rate times thirty days. Decimal terabytes, the way hosts and clouds count them.
| port | per second | per 30-day month |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Gbps | 125 MB | 324 TB |
| 10 Gbps | 1,250 MB | 3,240 TB |
| 25 Gbps | 3,125 MB | 8,100 TB |
| 40 Gbps | 5,000 MB | 12,960 TB |
| 100 Gbps | 12,500 MB | 32,400 TB |
Decimal units throughout: a terabyte is 10¹² bytes, the way hosts and clouds bill. Your OS may show binary TiB, about 9% larger per unit, so the same transfer looks smaller there.
Unmetered, not unmeasured.
Nothing bills your traffic here, but it is still there to see: on the traffic graph of your port and in tools on the server itself. Graphs are drawn the same way everywhere, so the numbers on them mean the same thing too.
- a point
- the average rate over 5 minutes, not the fastest second in them
- out · in
- out is what your server sends, in is what it receives
- average
- times the hours in the month, it is your volume in TB
- 95th percentile
- often drawn as a line; on a metered plan it is the bill
- average
- 208 Mbps
- moved this month
- 67.4 TB
- 95th percentile
- 332 Mbps
- peak
- 850 Mbps
The transfer allowance.
The plan includes a number of terabytes a month. Some hosts count outbound traffic only, others both directions. Under the line the invoice does not move. Over it, usually one of two things happens: every extra gigabyte is billed at an overage rate, or the port is slowed down until the month resets.
The allowance, not the port, is the real limit. A 1 Gbps port can move 324 TB in a month, so any allowance below that runs out before the month does if the port is kept busy. The question to ask is how many days of full speed the plan pays for.
- counted
- bytes moved in the month
- over the line
- overage per GB, or a slower port
- suits
- steady traffic well under the allowance
- bites
- a launch, a release day, a video that spreads
The 95th percentile.
Here you pay for a rate, not a volume. The host reads your port every 5 minutes: 8,640 samples in a 30-day month. At the end of the month it sorts them, drops the highest 5%, which is 432 samples, and bills the highest one left, usually as a price per Mbps.
Those 432 samples add up to 36 hours. Bursts that fit inside them, in total across the month, cost nothing. A burst that runs longer stops being dropped: it becomes the rate the whole month is billed at, quiet days included.
- suits
- a quiet baseline with short, rare peaks
- bites
- peaks that last days, or a baseline that keeps rising
Billing by percentile throws away the busiest 5% of samples. That rule decides your invoice.
A burst that short falls inside the discarded 5%, so it costs nothing; the invoice is written by the quiet 100 Mbps instead. Two levels simplify a real profile: this shows the mechanism, not anyone’s bill.
The port, and nothing counting it.
You pay for the size of the port: 1, 10, 25, 40 or 100 Gbps. Nothing measures how much went through it or how fast, for billing. Run it at line rate every hour of the month and the invoice is the same as in a quiet month. The Xeon E-2236 · 6c / 12t server, for example, is $99 a month on a 1 Gbps unmetered port, whether it moves 1 TB or 324.
Unmetered is not unlimited. The port is the limit: 1 Gbps moves at most 1 Gbps. The port is yours alone. The uplink behind it is shared, sized for the servers on it, and when it gets close to full we add capacity rather than hold anyone back. Section 3 of the terms →§3 · Use of network resourcesYour port is unmetered. There is no monthly transfer allowance, no overage rate, no 95th-percentile billing and no fair-use clause that quietly reintroduces one.read the section →
- counted
- nothing
- allowance
- none
- percentile
- none
- fair-use clause
- none
- you pay for
- the port size, flat monthly
- suits
- sustained egress, big releases, traffic you cannot forecast