Traffic and network speed

Two numbers matter for a server's network: how much it may send and receive, and how fast. The first one is easy. There's no quota. The second one depends on the plan and on what the neighbours are doing at that moment. Here's how both work, in numbers.

Traffic: no monthly quota

None of our plans has a traffic allowance. We don't count gigabytes against a limit, don't throttle after a few terabytes and don't bill overage. A server that pushes data all month at full speed is fine, as long as the traffic itself is legitimate: sending spam, attacking other hosts and similar abuse end the service regardless of volume.

Port speed

The port is the ceiling for a single server. The other ceiling is the uplink of the physical server it runs on, which is also 1 Gbit/s and carries every virtual server there.

How bandwidth is shared

When the uplink is quiet, one server can use almost all of it: about 940 Mbit/s in each direction. When several servers are busy at the same moment, the line is split evenly between the addresses that are actively sending or receiving. Two busy servers get roughly 470 Mbit/s each, three get about 310, and so on. Upload and download are shared separately.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• Nobody can take the whole line from you. A neighbour running a big download can't push your share below an even split.
• You won't always get the full port. If you need a guaranteed rate at all times, a shared virtual server is the wrong product, whoever sells it.

On NAT servers the split works the same way: each NAT server counts separately, even though its outbound address isn't its own.

Measuring speed properly

Most “slow server” reports we see are slow tests: one stream, a 10-second run or a busy public test server. The minimum check is iperf3 with four streams for 30 seconds against a machine you control:

iperf3 -c your-other-server -P 4 -t 30        # upload from this server
iperf3 -c your-other-server -P 4 -t 30 -R     # download to this server

The full method, including a test without a second machine and how to read the numbers, is in How to check your server's speed and traffic usage.

Seeing your traffic

The server page in the dashboard has network graphs for the last hour, day and week, drawn from the virtualization layer, so they work even if the server's OS is down. They show rates, not a running monthly total.

For a monthly total, install vnStat inside the server: it reads the interface counters and survives reboots. Setup and a per-process view are in the same guide: How to check your server's speed and traffic usage.

Outbound mail and other ports

Speed isn't the only network rule. Outbound SMTP on ports 25 and 465 is closed by default on every plan; sending through a mail provider on port 587 works. NAT servers accept inbound connections only on their personal SSH or RDP port. The details are in Network & ports.

If the speed really is low

Measure as described above, from two different test servers, and note the time. Then open a ticket with the commands and the output. Numbers from a 20-second, multi-stream test let us check the uplink at that exact time; "it feels slow" doesn't. If you need more than a share of a 1 Gbit/s line, tell us what you're running and we'll say honestly whether our plans fit it.

Plans and their ports are listed on the plans page.