"Unmetered" is one of the most-abused words in hosting, and also one of the most useful when a provider means it. The confusion is worth clearing up with arithmetic, because the difference between unmetered bandwidth and a metered allowance is usually the largest variable line on an infrastructure invoice — and it is invisible until the month it is not.
What unmetered actually means
Unmetered means there is no monthly transfer quota and no per-gigabyte charge. It does not mean infinite. The ceiling is the port.
That ceiling is computable, so compute it:
| Port speed | Bytes per second | Theoretical maximum per 30-day month |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Gbps | 125 MB/s | ~324 TB |
| 10 Gbps | 1.25 GB/s | ~3,240 TB (3.24 PB) |
| 100 Gbps | 12.5 GB/s | ~32,400 TB |
A 1 Gbps unmetered port saturated every second of a month moves roughly 324 terabytes. In practice nothing runs at 100% — real traffic has peaks and troughs, and a sustained 30–40% of line rate is a busy server. So an unmetered 1 Gbps port realistically delivers somewhere around 100–130 TB a month of actual transfer.
Hold that number, because it is the one that makes the comparison concrete.
What metered costs, using published rates
Two real, published examples from September 2026:
- DigitalOcean includes a transfer allowance per Droplet, pooled across the team, and bills additional outbound transfer at $0.01 per GiB. That is $10.24 per TB.
- Hetzner gives dedicated servers with a 1 Gbit uplink unlimited traffic; servers with a 10 Gbit uplink include 20 TB a month and charge €1 per TB for overage.
An order-of-magnitude spread between two reputable providers, for the same commodity. That spread is the entire point of reading the transfer terms before the CPU specification.
Now run a workload through it. Suppose a service pushes 20 TB a month — a modest video or download workload, a busy API, a mid-sized media site.
| Model | Monthly transfer cost |
|---|---|
| Unmetered 1 Gbps port | €0 — 20 TB is ~6% of the port's ceiling |
| Metered at €1/TB with 20 TB included | €0 |
| Metered at $0.01/GiB with 4 TB included | 16 TB × $10.24 ≈ $164 |
At 50 TB the third row is roughly $470 a month in transfer alone, which is more than most of the servers under discussion. This is why "the VPS is $40" is an incomplete sentence.
The fair-use question, asked properly
Providers advertising unmetered bandwidth sometimes attach acceptable-use language. This is not automatically dishonest — a network is a shared resource and there are genuine abuse cases — but it is the thing to ask about directly. Three questions get you a straight answer:
- Is there a quota anywhere in the contract? If the terms name a number, it is metered with extra steps.
- What happens at sustained line rate? The honest answers are "nothing" or "we will call you about an upgrade." The answer to watch for is "we will rate-limit you," because that is a quota expressed as a speed.
- Is the port dedicated or shared? A shared 10 Gbps port with unmetered transfer is a different product from a dedicated one, and both are sold with the same adjective.
NexonHost's unmetered Linux VPS and unmetered dedicated servers are sold on the first model: no transfer quota, the port speed as the stated limit, with 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps and higher options depending on the line.
Windows is sold both ways, as two separate products rather than a toggle. WIN1–WIN4 are metered — a 10 Gbps port against a stated 4 TB to 15 TB a month — while UWIN1–UWIN4 drop the quota entirely and take a 1 Gbps port instead, 2 Gbps on UWIN4. Neither is unlimited: one caps the volume, the other caps the rate. Which shape fits is set out on the Windows VPS page.
When metered is the better buy
Being fair to the other side, because most workloads are on it.
Low and predictable transfer. A brochure site, an internal tool, a small SaaS with a few hundred gigabytes a month will never approach an included allowance. Paying an unmetered premium for 200 GB of traffic is waste.
Spiky but small. A pooled allowance across several machines, like DigitalOcean's team-level pooling, absorbs variance well when the totals stay modest.
Egress that belongs on a CDN anyway. If the traffic is static assets, the right answer is often neither: put a CDN in front and the origin's transfer collapses to cache fills. Comparing unmetered against metered for a workload that should be behind a CDN is optimising the wrong number.
When unmetered is the only sane answer
Video, downloads and file distribution. Transfer is the product. Metering it means your costs scale with your success, linearly and without a ceiling.
Backup and replication targets. Large, periodic, and worst when you need them most — a full restore is a large egress event on the day you can least afford a surprise.
Game servers and real-time services. Sustained low-latency traffic that is difficult to forecast per month.
Anything behind DDoS filtering. Attack traffic is transfer too. On a metered plan, an attack that gets absorbed at the network edge can still show up as a bill; on an unmetered port it does not. See our DDoS mitigation services for what gets filtered before it reaches you.
That last point is underrated. Metered bandwidth turns a security event into a financial one.
Port speed is a different question from quota
These get conflated constantly. Quota is how much you may move in a month. Port speed is how fast you may move it at any instant.
A 1 Gbps unmetered port is the right choice for a service moving 50 TB a month steadily. A 10 Gbps port is for bursts — a release day, a live event, a big customer's restore — where the constraint is how quickly you can serve a spike rather than how much you move in total. Buying 10 Gbps for a workload that averages 20 Mbps buys nothing except the ability to absorb an unusual hour, which is sometimes exactly what you want and often is not. When a 10 Gbps dedicated server makes sense works through that decision properly.
How to decide in ten minutes
- Measure a real month.
vnstaton the server, or the provider's graphs. Do not estimate. - Take the peak month, not the average. You are buying for the bad month.
- Add growth, honestly — the number you would be embarrassed to have underestimated.
- Price that figure under each model, including overage rates, not just the headline.
- Ask what a sustained peak does, contractually.
- Check whether a CDN removes the question entirely. If most of the traffic is static, it probably does.
If the answer lands under a few terabytes a month, buy metered and stop thinking about it. If it lands in double-digit terabytes, or if transfer volume is the business, unmetered bandwidth removes a variable that otherwise grows exactly as fast as you do. Our unmetered dedicated server range is priced on that basis: no quota anywhere in the contract, the port speed as the stated limit.
Related reading: when a 10Gbps dedicated server makes sense, VPS vs dedicated server, and the dedicated server DDoS protection checklist.
Sources
- Bandwidth billing, DigitalOcean documentation, retrieved 7 September 2026 — $0.01 per GiB additional outbound transfer, pooled at team level.
- Traffic, Hetzner Docs, retrieved 7 September 2026 — 1 Gbit uplink unlimited; 10 Gbit uplink 20 TB inclusive, €1/TB overage.
- Port-capacity figures are computed from line rate (1 Gbps = 125 MB/s) over a 30-day month, in decimal terabytes.
- Plan specifications as published on nexonhost.com on 7 September 2026; check the product page for current figures.
