“Unmetered bandwidth” and “unlimited bandwidth” sound like the same promise. They are not. The difference decides whether a busy month costs you nothing extra, or ends with a surprise invoice, a throttled port, or a suspension email citing a fair-use clause you never read.
This guide explains what each term actually means on a dedicated server, how 95th percentile billing works, and how to tell a genuine unmetered plan from a marketing one. If you already know you need one, you can go straight to our unmetered dedicated servers in the Netherlands, with true-unmetered ports from 100 Mbps to 20 Gbps.
First, What Bandwidth Means in Hosting
In web hosting, bandwidth describes two related things: how fast your server can move data (the speed of its network port) and how much data your plan lets you transfer in a month (the allowance, on metered plans).
A useful picture is a water hose. A narrow garden hose and a fire hose can both deliver water all day, but the fire hose moves far more of it per second. Port speed is the width of the hose; monthly transfer is how much water actually flowed through it.
Every bandwidth plan limits one of those two numbers. The honest ones tell you which.
What Unmetered Bandwidth Really Means
On an unmetered plan, the volume of data you move is never billed. You pay for a port speed, and you can push that port as hard as you want, all month long. There is no per-gigabyte meter running in the background.
The limit is physics, not a quota: a 1 Gbps port running flat out around the clock moves roughly 330 TB in a month. That is the ceiling, and it is included in the flat price. A 10 Gbps port raises it to roughly 3.3 petabytes.
So “unmetered” does not mean infinite. It means the limit is a clearly defined port speed that you chose, instead of a volume cap that charges or punishes you for being busy.
How 95th Percentile Billing Works
Serious unmetered plans, including ours, define “how hard you can push” with 95th percentile measurement. It is less scary than it sounds.
Your traffic is sampled every five minutes through the month. At the end of the month, the top 5% of those samples are thrown away, and the highest remaining sample is your 95th percentile. As long as that number stays at or below your plan (say, 5 Gbps on a True-Unmetered 5 Gbps plan), there is nothing extra to pay.
Throwing away the top 5% is what makes the model friendly in practice: short spikes, live events, and large one-off transfers land in the discarded samples. On our plans the physical port is also set above the plan level, so those spikes have real headroom to ride instead of hitting a wall. If your sustained traffic genuinely outgrows the plan, you move up a tier. The step is predictable, and the meter never runs per gigabyte.
What “Unlimited Bandwidth” Usually Means
No provider has infinite capacity, so “unlimited” is always standing on something. Usually one of these:
- A fair-use clause. Unlimited until your usage is “excessive”, a word the provider defines after the fact.
- Throttling or deprioritization. The volume is unlimited, but your speed quietly drops once you cross an invisible line.
- Shared, oversubscribed capacity. The port is unlimited on paper and congested at peak hours, exactly when your traffic matters most.
- Workload restrictions. Streaming, VPN, or download traffic patterns are banned in the terms, so heavy use becomes a terms-of-service violation rather than a bill.
It is the same trick as a phone plan with “unlimited data” that slows to a crawl after a threshold. The word unlimited describes the marketing, not the network.
The Real Difference: Who Defines the Limit
| Unmetered | “Unlimited” | |
|---|---|---|
| The limit | A port speed you chose, stated up front | Undefined, enforced after the fact |
| Busy month | Same flat price | Overage, throttling, or a warning email |
| Traffic spikes | Ride the burst headroom free | May trigger fair-use enforcement |
| Heavy workloads (video, VPN, downloads) | Expected and allowed | Often banned in the fine print |
| When you grow | Upgrade the port, a predictable step | Renegotiate, or get asked to leave |
Transparency is the entire difference. With unmetered bandwidth you know exactly what you bought, so you can plan around it. With “unlimited” bandwidth, someone else decides when you have had too much, and they tell you at the worst possible moment.
Which One Should You Pick?
If your outbound traffic is modest and predictable, a metered dedicated server with a generous fixed allowance is often the economical choice, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Unmetered is the right call when you move serious sustained traffic or cannot afford surprises: video streaming, file and software distribution, VPN services, backups, busy stores and APIs. Most ordinary websites are comfortable on a 1 Gbps unmetered port; streaming and distribution workloads usually start there and grow into 10 Gbps and beyond.
Avoid any plan whose answer to “what exactly happens when I use a lot?” takes more than one sentence.
Get Bandwidth That Means What It Says
Unmetered bandwidth is not the same thing as “unlimited bandwidth”. One is a defined port you can max out at a flat price; the other is a promise with an asterisk.
Our True-Unmetered dedicated servers run on a premium AMS-IX-connected network in the Netherlands, with ports from 100 Mbps to 20 Gbps, burst headroom included, and a 100% uptime SLA. If you are not sure what size port you need, talk to us and we will size it honestly, or use our server recommendation wizard.
