10 Gbps dedicated servers and unmetered bandwidth explained

Every hosting catalogue sells bandwidth with the same three words: fast, unlimited, guaranteed. On a 1 Gbit/s website server the gap between marketing and reality rarely matters. On a 10 Gbit/s line that gap is the whole product: the words unmetered and guaranteed can describe a dedicated channel that moves petabytes, or a shared uplink that collapses every evening at prime time. This guide explains the terms precisely, shows who genuinely needs 10 Gbit/s, and gives a checklist to run before paying for any high bandwidth server.

What unmetered really means

A regular dedicated server comes with a traffic allowance: 30, 50 or 100 TB per month. Cross it and you either pay per extra terabyte or the port drops to a fraction of its speed. Unmetered removes the meter entirely: nobody counts terabytes and the invoice does not depend on how much you transfer. The only physical limit left is the port speed itself. A fully loaded 10 Gbit/s port moves roughly 3.2 petabytes per month, which is the honest ceiling of such a line; no allowance-based plan comes anywhere near it.

Unmetered on its own is not automatically generous. If a provider connects fifty unmetered servers to one 10 Gbit/s uplink, every one of them is unmetered and none of them can actually use the speed. That is why the second word matters more than the first.

Guaranteed, shared and burst ports

These three port types hide behind similar price tags, and the difference only shows under load.

• A guaranteed port is reserved for your server end to end and runs full duplex: 10 Gbit/s in and 10 Gbit/s out simultaneously, at three in the morning and at nine in the evening alike.
• A shared port connects several customers through one uplink. Speed tests at night look perfect; sustained evening throughput quietly drops to whatever your neighbours leave you.
• A burst port shows 10 Gbit/s briefly and then shapes you down to a lower committed rate. Good for spiky small workloads, useless for continuous streaming or backups.

Honest providers state which type they sell. If the page does not say, ask in writing before ordering; the answer tends to be revealing either way.

What 95th percentile billing means

Carrier-style contracts often bill on the 95th percentile: the provider samples your traffic every five minutes for a month, discards the top five percent of samples and bills the highest value that remains. It suits predictable enterprise flows, but consumer-facing traffic is spiky by nature, and one strong week can set the price for the whole month. A flat unmetered price removes that uncertainty: the number on the order page is the number on the invoice, whatever the graphs did.

Who genuinely needs 10 Gbit/s

• Video streaming origins feeding a CDN or serving viewers directly.
• Backup and archive targets collecting nightly copies from whole server fleets.
• Software mirrors, update servers and game patch distribution.
• Big data pipelines replicating datasets between sites.
• Marketplaces, ad platforms and APIs whose peaks have outgrown 1 Gbit/s.

If your project moves a few terabytes per month, a high bandwidth line is money spent on air: a regular dedicated server with a 30 TB allowance or a VPS in Amsterdam covers it for a fraction of the price. Bandwidth products pay off exactly when bandwidth is the product.

Why the server's location matters

A 10 Gbit/s port is only useful if the networks behind it can carry what you push. Amsterdam is one of the strongest places in Europe for that: it hosts AMS-IX, one of the largest internet exchanges in the world, and reaches London, Paris and Frankfurt in a few milliseconds. An origin server there serves Western Europe on short, stable paths and hands traffic to CDNs at the exchange instead of hauling it across half a continent first.

A checklist before you order

• Is the port dedicated to my server or shared? Get the answer in writing.
• Is it full duplex, with the full rate in both directions at once?
• What hardware generation is behind it? A 2016 chassis behind a fast port bottlenecks on CPU and disks long before the network.
• Is DDoS protection included or a paid extra?
• What does the acceptable use policy say about your workload, and does streaming require licence proof?
• What are the delivery time and the setup fee?

Our own line answers all of the above on one page: 10 Gbps unmetered dedicated servers in Amsterdam run on guaranteed full duplex ports, current generation AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon hardware, with DDoS protection included and four configurations from 1550 EUR per month. If you are unsure whether your workload needs the line, describe it to support and we will answer honestly, including when the answer is a cheaper server.