What a 10 Gbps unmetered port really costs in 2026

A 10 Gbps port is easy to advertise and expensive to sell without a meter. Of roughly 60 hosting providers we examined in September 2026, only 19 sell 10 Gbps unmetered, and the median premium over their standard port is about $630 a month. Below: what that premium buys, how the alternatives are billed, and how to test a port once you have one.

What 19 providers charge

The figures are public list prices for the monthly add-on that upgrades a server to a 10 Gbps unmetered port, checked in September 2026, excluding VAT and setup fees. Euro prices are converted at $1.16 per euro.

Across all 19 providers, the median add-on is about $630 a month, and the range runs from $100 to roughly $1,500. The table lists the 13 providers whose add-on is a single published price; their own median is $580. The full sample also includes offers with approximate or plan-dependent prices from $900 upward.

Where 10 Gbps unmetered comes bundled with the server instead of as an add-on, the median monthly price was about $650 for entry-level 6–8-core machines, about $840 for storage servers and about $1,220 for 32–48-core EPYC servers.

Takeaway: in 2026, a 10 Gbps unmetered port is still a premium feature. At the median, the add-on costs more per month than the typical market price of a Ryzen or entry-level EPYC server with a standard port.

Metered, unmetered, “unlimited”: what the words mean

Bandwidth is billed in four main ways, and the difference matters more than the port speed printed on the order page.

• Metered: quota plus overage. You get a transfer allowance and pay per terabyte beyond it. Hetzner, for example, does not sell 10 Gbps unmetered: according to its public list prices, checked in September 2026, its 10 Gbps option includes 20 TB, then bills €1 per additional TB. The bare-metal cloud platforms we reviewed meter bandwidth too, typically with 5 to 150 TB included and around $10 per extra TB.
• 95th percentile. The standard model for IP transit and colocation. The provider samples your rate every five minutes, discards the top 5% of samples and bills the highest remaining one. In a 30-day month, that forgives about 36 hours of peaks. You pay for the rate you sustain, not for volume.
• Unmetered. Traffic is not counted or billed; the port speed is the only limit. What matters sits in the terms: whether the port is dedicated or shared with other customers, whether an inbound/outbound ratio applies, and what the acceptable-use policy says about sustained load.
• “Unlimited” and fair use. “Unlimited” has no technical definition. Offers that use it often carry a fair-use clause that throttles or reviews servers above an unstated threshold. Ask for the number; if there isn’t one, assume a limit exists anyway.

What 10 Gbps means in petabytes

Ten gigabits per second, the data rate standardized for Ethernet by IEEE 802.3ae in 2002, is 1.25 gigabytes per second. Sustained for a 30-day month, that is 3.24 petabytes, or about 108 terabytes a day. At 1 Gbps, the same month carries 324 TB.

That is a theoretical ceiling. With standard 1,500-byte Ethernet frames, headers and framing leave about 94–95% of line rate for TCP payload, so a saturated port delivers a little over 3 PB of useful data a month. In practice, few servers run flat out around the clock: traffic follows users, and most ports spend nights and weekends well below capacity. That gap between average and peak is exactly what makes unmetered pricing possible.

The same traffic at cloud egress prices

Hyperscale clouds meter outbound internet traffic. AWS’s public list price for data transfer from EC2 to the internet in US East (N. Virginia) is $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB of the month, $0.085 for the next 40 TB, $0.07 for the next 100 TB and $0.05 beyond 150 TB, after a 100 GB monthly free tier shared across services. Those rates come from the AWS price list published on 16 September 2026.

Ranges reflect whether a gigabyte is counted as 10⁹ or 2³⁰ bytes. Large customers negotiate private discounts and push much of their traffic through CDNs with separate pricing, so few pay these exact amounts. The point is the order of magnitude: at list price, metered egress costs tens of thousands of dollars a month for volumes that an unmetered 10 Gbps port moves for a flat fee.

Why unmetered is possible at all

Providers buy capacity wholesale. TeleGeography reports that in Q2 2026 the lowest IP transit prices in the most competitive markets were $0.07 per Mbps per month on 10 GigE ports and $0.03 on 100 GigE ports, excluding local access and installation. At those floor prices, 10 Gbps of transit costs about $700 a month bought as a 10G port, or about $300 as a slice of a 100G port. Weighted median prices are higher, and many markets cost more.

Peering lowers the cost of traffic exchanged directly with other networks. At AMS-IX in Amsterdam, a 100GE peering port lists at €3,240 a month on a 12-month term, before colocation and cross-connect fees, however much traffic crosses it.

Networks are not built to carry every customer at line rate at the same moment, and they don’t need to be: most servers use a fraction of their port most of the time. Unmetered pricing is a bet on that average. The add-on price, the acceptable-use policy and any fair-use clause are how each provider sizes the bet.

The shared-uplink caveat

“Dedicated 10 Gbps” describes the port between your server and the provider’s switch. Everything beyond it is shared, at every provider: aggregation switches, routers, transit links, peering ports and the far network’s own capacity. Real-world throughput therefore depends on the route to the other end, the time of day and the receiving host as much as on your port.

Distance matters too. A single TCP connection can only keep one window of data in flight per round trip: at 10 Gbps and 100 ms of round-trip time, filling the pipe takes about 125 MB. ESnet notes that default Linux buffer limits are too small for 10G paths and that data-movement tools typically run several parallel streams. One slow stream to a distant host says little about the port.

How to test a port

A useful test separates the port from the path. Our guide to testing your server’s network speed covers it step by step; the short version:

1. Test first to a host in the same city, ideally one you control, then to more distant ones. Same-metro results show what the port and local network can do; distant ones show the path.
2. Use parallel streams and both directions. With iperf3, -P sets the number of streams, each in its own thread since version 3.16, and -R reverses the direction.
3. Run for long enough to see sustained behavior, and repeat at different times of day.
4. Check the far end: a host on a 1 Gbps port, or with small TCP buffers, caps the result.

# on the far end
iperf3 -s
# from your server: 8 streams for 30 seconds, then the reverse direction
iperf3 -c far-end.example.net -P 8 -t 30 -O 3
iperf3 -c far-end.example.net -P 8 -t 30 -O 3 -R

For long paths, ESnet’s Linux tuning page lists sysctl values sized for hosts with 10G NICs, starting with net.core.rmem_max and net.core.wmem_max raised to 64 MB.

Methodology

• Sample. About 60 hosting providers examined; the 19 that sell a 10 Gbps unmetered option form the sample.
• Sources. Public pricing pages, configurators and catalogs, including the public APIs those pages load. Prices checked in September 2026.
• What we compared. The monthly price difference between a provider’s standard port and its 10 Gbps unmetered option, excluding VAT and setup fees, with euros converted at 1.16.
• What we excluded. 10 Gbps options with a transfer quota, such as 20 TB included plus per-TB billing: they are metered by definition.
• Limitations. List prices only, with no negotiated discounts. No adjustment for network quality, transit mix, peering or DDoS protection. Some providers price by location or server model, and all prices change.
• Disclosure. PowerDedi includes a 10 Gbps unmetered port on every server, so we have an interest in this comparison. That is why the list prices and the method are published here.

For reference, our own definition of unmetered is: no transfer quota, no overage fee, no 95th-percentile billing and no inbound/outbound ratio. Each server has its own 10 Gbps port, and, as on any network, the uplinks beyond it are shared. The full terms are on our 10 Gbps unmetered page.

Sources

• Amazon EC2 On-Demand pricing: data transfer — Amazon Web Services
• IP Transit Pricing in 2026: More Competition, More Price Erosion — TeleGeography, 16 September 2026
• Pricing — AMS-IX
• Network cost monitoring and 95th percentile billing — Kentik
• IEEE P802.3ae 10Gb/s Ethernet Task Force — IEEE 802.3 Working Group
• Linux tuning — ESnet Fasterdata
• iperf2 / iperf3 — ESnet Fasterdata
• Invoking iperf3 — iperf3 documentation, ESnet