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Unmetered bandwidth means the provider does not count or bill the data you transfer: the speed of your port is the only limit. With 95th percentile billing, the provider measures your throughput every five minutes, discards the busiest 5% of the month and bills the next highest rate. With per-terabyte billing, every gigabyte above an allowance is charged. Which model is cheapest depends on how much you transfer and how steadily.
The short version
| Billing model | What is measured | What you pay | Suits | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unmetered port | Nothing: only the port speed caps you | A flat monthly price for the port | Heavy, sustained traffic; predictable budgets | Shared ports, fair-use clauses, traffic ratios |
| 95th percentile (burstable) | Throughput, sampled every 5 minutes | A committed rate, plus overage per Mbps above it | Steady traffic with short peaks | Peaks that last more than about 36 hours a month |
| Allowance + per-TB | Data transferred in the month | An included quota, then a price per TB | Low or moderate volumes | Overage on a busy month, often outbound only |
| Cloud egress | Every GB leaving the provider | Tiered price per GB | Small volumes on cloud platforms | Costs that grow linearly with success |
How 95th percentile billing works
Burstable billing is the classic way carriers and data centers price IP transit. A router records the average throughput of your port in each five-minute interval. At the end of the month, the samples are sorted from highest to lowest, the top 5% are thrown away, and the highest remaining sample becomes the billable rate for the whole month. Inbound and outbound are counted separately, and providers typically bill the higher of the two.
A 30-day month has 8,640 five-minute samples. Discarding 5% removes 432 of them, which is 36 hours: you can burst for about 72 minutes a day, or 36 hours in one go, without paying for it. The 433rd busiest sample sets the price.
- Example 1. Your server pushes 2 Gbps around the clock and 8 Gbps during a 30-hour launch. The 30 hours fit inside the discarded 36: you are billed for 2 Gbps.
- Example 2. The same server runs a second launch the following week, for another 10 hours at 8 Gbps. You now have 40 hours at 8 Gbps, more than the 36 that are discarded: the whole month is billed at 8 Gbps, four times the usual rate.
That is the trade-off of the model. It forgives short spikes, but a busy day of the week repeated every week, or one event that runs long, sets the rate for the entire month.
What “unmetered” really means
An unmetered port is not measured for billing. You pay for the port, and whatever it carries is included. Two words in the offer decide how much that is worth.
- Port speed. “Unmetered” on a 100 Mbps port and on a 10 Gbps port are different products: the second can move a hundred times more data.
- Dedicated or shared. A dedicated port is yours alone up to the switch. A shared port, or an oversubscribed uplink behind it, means you compete with other customers at busy hours. Every network shares capacity somewhere beyond the port; what matters is whether the provider says where.
“Unlimited” is a marketing word, not a billing model. Offers sold as unlimited usually carry a fair-use policy, and some only cover outbound traffic, cap the inbound-to-outbound ratio, or reserve the right to slow you down above an undisclosed threshold. Read the policy, not the headline.
Our own definition, for comparison: every PowerDedi server has its own 10 Gbps unmetered port, with no quota, no overage fee, no 95th percentile billing and no ratio. The uplinks beyond the port are shared, as on any network, and we only intervene on traffic that harms the network, such as attacks, contacting you first unless an attack is in progress.
How much data can a port actually move?
The ceiling is simple arithmetic: port speed × seconds in the month ÷ 8 bits per byte. In a 30-day month, at 100% utilization:
| Port | Maximum per day | Maximum per 30-day month | At a realistic 30% average |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 Mbps | 1.08 TB | 32.4 TB | about 10 TB |
| 1 Gbps | 10.8 TB | 324 TB | about 97 TB |
| 10 Gbps | 108 TB | 3,240 TB | about 970 TB |
Decimal terabytes (1 TB = 1012 bytes). Few workloads run a port flat out all month, which is why “1 Gbps unmetered” and “30 TB included” can look similar on paper and behave very differently in a busy month.
What each model costs at 50 TB, 200 TB and 1 PB a month
Bandwidth only, server excluded, outbound traffic, list prices as of October 2026, VAT excluded:
| Model (example) | 50 TB / month | 200 TB / month | 1 PB / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud egress (AWS, US East: first 100 GB free, then $0.09 to $0.05 per GB by tier) | about $4,290 | about $13,800 | about $53,800 |
| Per-TB on a 10 Gbps uplink (Hetzner: €43 for the uplink, 20 TB included, then €1 per TB) | about €73 | about €223 | about €1,023 |
| 10 Gbps unmetered add-on (median of 19 hosts in our survey) | about $630 | about $630 | about $630 |
| 10 Gbps unmetered included (PowerDedi) | $0 extra | $0 extra | $0 extra |
Three things stand out.
- Cloud egress is in another league. Per-GB pricing is reasonable for a few terabytes and punishing beyond that. AWS asks customers above 500 TB a month to contact sales, so the last column is indicative.
- A cheap per-TB price is genuinely cheap. At €1 per TB, Hetzner’s metered 10 Gbps uplink costs less than a typical unmetered add-on until you pass roughly 500 TB a month. Its inbound traffic is not counted at all. If your volume is moderate and stable, metering is not a problem in itself.
- Unmetered pays off with volume and with uncertainty. A flat port fee wins for sustained heavy traffic, and it removes the risk of a surprise bill when a release, a migration or a viral video triples your traffic. Our survey of 10 Gbps unmetered pricing lists what 19 hosts charge for it, from about $100 to $1,500 a month.
Eight questions to ask before you sign
- Is the port dedicated to my server, or shared? Ask for it in writing.
- Is traffic counted at all? “Unmetered” should mean no counter on the bill, not a large quota.
- Does inbound traffic count? Backups, snapshot downloads and blockchain syncs are mostly inbound.
- Is there a ratio rule? Some offers require outbound to stay above or below a share of inbound.
- What does the fair-use policy say, in numbers? A threshold you cannot see is a threshold you cannot plan for.
- What happens above a limit: throttling, a bill, or suspension?
- Is attack traffic billed? On a 95th percentile or per-TB plan, an unmitigated DDoS can set your rate for the month. Always-on mitigation keeps it off your port.
- Is the fast port included, or an add-on? A 10 Gbps uplink, network card or optics are often priced separately from the server.
Then measure. A multi-stream iperf3 test during the first days shows whether the port delivers what was sold, at the hours you care about.
Which model fits which workload
- Video streaming, CDN edges and download mirrors run hot for hours every day: per-GB and 95th percentile bills grow with every viewer, unmetered does not. See streaming and CDN servers.
- Blockchain nodes download terabytes during the initial sync and serve peers around the clock; snapshot downloads are inbound-heavy. See blockchain node hosting.
- Off-site backups are quiet most of the month and enormous during a full restore. An unmetered port makes the restore cost the same as an idle month; a storage server is the usual target.
- Websites, APIs and game servers rarely pass a few tens of terabytes. Any model works; DDoS protection and latency matter more than the billing method.
Every PowerDedi server, from the $55 Ryzen 5 7600 to the 192-core EPYC, comes with the same 10 Gbps unmetered port, so the price you see is the price you pay whatever the traffic.
Sources
- Burstable billing — Wikipedia
- Traffic — Hetzner Docs
- Price Dedicated Server Addons — Hetzner Docs (last changed October 7, 2026)
- Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing: data transfer — Amazon Web Services
- AWS S3 Pricing Explained (2026): data transfer tiers — Upstash, October 9, 2026
- 10 Gbps unmetered bandwidth prices in 2026: 19 hosts compared — PowerDedi
