“Bandwidth” is used for three different things in VPS plans, and mixing them up leads to buying the wrong plan. Here’s what each one means and how to work out what you need.

Three different numbers

Term What it means Example
Port speed Maximum rate data can flow at any moment 1 Gbps port
Monthly transfer (traffic) Total data allowed per month 3 TB/month
Unmetered bandwidth No monthly total — you can use the port speed continuously 10 Mbps unmetered

So “3 TB @ 1 Gbps” means: you can burst up to 1 Gbps, and the total for the month is 3 TB. “10 Mbps unmetered” means: you can transfer at up to 10 Mbps all month, with no monthly cap.

How they compare in practice

A 10 Mbps port used flat out for a whole month transfers about:

10 Mbit/s ÷ 8 = 1.25 MB/s × 2,592,000 s (30 days) ≈ 3.24 TB

A 1 Gbps port could transfer a 1 GB file in about 8 seconds, but a 3 TB allowance would be used up in about 7 hours at full speed.

  • High port speed + transfer allowance suits typical websites and APIs: fast page loads and downloads, moderate total traffic.
  • Unmetered + modest port speed suits steady, predictable traffic: streaming relays, mirrors, game servers, users in mainland China over premium routes.

How VPS.DO plans work

  • USA VPS: 1 Gbps port with a monthly transfer allowance that grows with the plan.
  • Hong Kong VPS: unmetered CN2 + BGP bandwidth, with a port speed in Mbps that grows with the plan — no monthly transfer limit.
  • Japan VPS: a port speed in Mbps per plan, over international transit and CN2 GIA.

Premium routes to mainland China (CN2) are much more expensive than ordinary transit, which is why Hong Kong plans are sold by Mbps rather than by terabytes. See why CN2 + BGP matters for China traffic.

How much do you need?

Estimate monthly transfer:

average page weight × page views per month

A site with 2 MB pages and 100,000 page views uses about 200 GB/month. With a CDN caching static files, origin traffic is often much lower.

Rough guide:

Use Typical monthly transfer
Small business site / blog 10–100 GB
Busy WordPress or WooCommerce site 100 GB–1 TB
File downloads, video, backups served to users 1 TB+
VPN for a few users 50–500 GB

Remember: on most providers, incoming traffic is free or counted separately; check what’s metered.

Measure your actual usage

apt install -y vnstat
systemctl enable --now vnstat
vnstat            # daily/monthly totals
vnstat -l         # live rate

Your control panel also shows bandwidth graphs for the VPS.

Why measured speed differs from port speed

  • Distance and latency — TCP throughput drops as round-trip time grows. Enabling BBR congestion control helps (net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control=bbr).
  • The route — traffic crosses several networks; the slowest one limits you. This is why routes to China matter so much.
  • The other end — the user’s connection or the remote server may be the limit.
  • Single-connection tests — use multiple streams (iperf3 -P 4) or a real download to judge capacity.

Test before you buy: each location page lists test IPs you can ping and trace from where your users are.

Reduce bandwidth use

  • Compress text (gzip/Brotli).
  • Serve images as WebP/AVIF at the right size.
  • Put a CDN in front for static files — see VPS + Cloudflare.
  • Cache aggressively with long Cache-Control headers for versioned assets.

Summary

Port speed is “how fast”, transfer is “how much”, unmetered means “as much as the port allows”. Websites usually want a fast port with a sensible allowance; steady streams and China-facing services often fit unmetered bandwidth better.

  • Bandwidth
  • Networking
  • VPS