Transfer and Port Speed
Think of the port speed as the width of the pipe and the allowance as how much water may flow through it in a month. A 10 Gbps port could, in theory, move 1 TB in under 15 minutes; the allowance is what keeps the month's total in check. Most servers never come near either limit.
How Much Things Use
| Activity | Roughly |
|---|---|
| A 2 MB web page, viewed 500,000 times | About 1 TB |
| A nightly 20 GB backup sent off the server | About 600 GB a month |
| One hour of 1080p video streamed to one viewer | About 3 GB |
| A WireGuard VPN for one person's everyday browsing | Tens of GB a month |
| Installing updates and Docker images | A few GB a month |
Heavy users are almost always one of three things: video, large downloads offered to the public, or backups. A CDN in front of a busy site moves most of its traffic off the server.
Check What Your Server Uses
The Bandwidth Used card on your server's page in the dashboard shows this month's total against the allowance. Inside the server, vnstat keeps its own record:
sudo apt install -y vnstat vnstat -m # per month vnstat -l # live, right now
What Happens at the Allowance
- At 80%, you get an email.
- At 100%, you get another, and the server is slowed to 10 Mbps each way. It keeps running: sites stay up, SSH and Remote Desktop still work, just slower.
- On the 1st of the month, usage resets and full speed returns by itself.
If you regularly reach the limit, a bigger plan comes with a bigger allowance. See How much CPU and RAM does a VPS need? for sizing the rest of the server.