What unmetered actually means
Unmetered is one of the most abused words in hosting. Here is what it means with us, and what it means almost everywhere else.
Two completely different things are being sold
Bandwidth is sold in two shapes, and the words get mixed up on purpose.
- Metered — you buy an amount of transfer, say 50 TB a month, on a port of a given speed. Go over and you pay per terabyte, or the port is throttled.
- Unmetered — you buy the port itself. There is no transfer counter. A 10 Gbit unmetered port running flat out for a month is roughly 3,200 TB, and that is yours.
The second is what we specialise in. You are renting a lane, not a quota.
The arithmetic, so nobody is surprised
A port running at 100% for 30 days moves, near enough:
- 1 Gbit — about 324 TB
- 10 Gbit — about 3,240 TB
- 25 Gbit — about 8,100 TB
- 100 Gbit — about 32,400 TB
Those are the numbers an unmetered port is physically capable of. Anyone quoting a metered plan with a comparable allowance is quoting a number that would take the same port months to deliver.
Where the catch usually hides
When unmetered is cheap, something is being hidden. The usual tricks, so you can ask the right question of anyone selling to you:
- A shared uplink. Forty servers with 1 Gbit unmetered ports behind a single 10 Gbit uplink. Each port is unmetered and the aggregate is oversold by four to one.
- A fair use clause that quietly converts unmetered into metered the moment you actually use it.
- Throttling after a threshold, described as traffic shaping.
- Burst versus committed. A “10 Gbit burst” port with 1 Gbit committed is a 1 Gbit port with good marketing.
We do not oversell the uplink behind unmetered ports. That is the whole product. If we cannot carry what we sold you, we have not sold you anything.
What about 95th percentile?
A third model, common at carrier level: your usage is sampled every five minutes for a month, the top 5% of samples are discarded, and you pay for the highest remaining one. It rewards steady traffic and forgives short spikes. It is a sane way to buy transit, but it is not unmetered — the bill moves with your traffic. If you want a fixed number on the invoice no matter what you push, you want an unmetered port.
What you can realistically achieve
Line rate on paper is not line rate in practice, and the limit is usually your machine rather than the network. A single TCP stream across a long distance will not fill a 10 Gbit port no matter how good the path is — window size and latency decide that. Disk throughput, the kernel's network stack, the number of parallel connections and how much CPU your application leaves for interrupts all matter more than the port speed above a certain point.
See speed testing for how to measure this without fooling yourself, and port speeds for choosing one.
What we expect in return
Only that the traffic is legitimate. An unmetered port is not a licence to run an amplification source, a spam cannon or a DDoS booter — the acceptable use policy covers that, and it is the one place we are inflexible. Within that, use the whole port. It is why you bought it.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base