Published: 1 October 2026
A 10 Gbps dedicated server earns its price once your traffic peaks above about 5 Gbps. In practice that means moving roughly 800 TB or more a month, or feeding more than a thousand 1080p viewers at the same time from one machine. Below that line, a 2 or 5 Gbps port carries the same useful traffic for less money. This post puts numbers on both sides: what a 10 Gbps unmetered port can move, what it costs per terabyte next to the other port speeds we sell, and what it takes to actually fill one.
10 Gbps in plain numbers
| Line rate | 1,250 MB per second |
|---|---|
| Ceiling over a 30 day month | 3,240 TB at 100% use |
| 1080p viewers at 5 Mbps each | 2,000 at the same time |
| 4K viewers at 25 Mbps each | 400 at the same time |
| Time to send 1 TB | 13 minutes 20 seconds |
Two words on our order form decide what you are actually buying. Unmetered means there is no monthly transfer quota and no overage bill, however many terabytes leave the server. Guaranteed means the full 10 Gbps is committed to your server. It is not a burst figure on a shared uplink that you only see when the neighbours are quiet.
What 10 Gbps costs on each of our servers
Every chassis in our dedicated server range can take a 10 Gbps port, apart from the Gold 6148, which starts at 25 Gbps. These are monthly prices for the server plus the port, with no setup fee:
| Server | Cores / threads | RAM | With 10 Gbps | Typical delivery |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dual Xeon E5 2630 v3 | 16 / 32 | 128 GB DDR4 | €659 | About an hour |
| Dual Xeon E5 2690 v4 | 28 / 56 | 128 GB DDR4 | €679 | About an hour |
| Dual Xeon E5 2699 v4 | 44 / 88 | 256 GB DDR4 | €749 | About an hour |
| AMD EPYC 9254 | 24 / 48 | 128 GB DDR5 | €1,169 | Up to 14 days |
| Dual AMD EPYC 9254 | 48 / 96 | 256 GB DDR5 | €1,399 | Up to 14 days |
| Dual AMD EPYC 9554 | 128 / 256 | 512 GB DDR5 | €1,679 | Up to 14 days |
| Dual AMD EPYC 9754 | 256 / 512 | 1 TB DDR5 | €2,239 | Up to 14 days |
The port is the expensive part of a 10 Gbps server. On the Xeon range it adds €500 a month to the price of the machine, on the EPYC range €800. That is why the cheapest way to get 10 Gbps is a 16 core Xeon: handing files to a network card is light work for any of these processors, so unless the same box also transcodes video or runs a busy database, extra cores buy you nothing at this job.
You can pay monthly, quarterly at three times the monthly price, or yearly at twelve times. Prices exclude VAT where VAT applies.
Price per terabyte, port by port
An unmetered port is a flat fee, so what a terabyte costs depends entirely on how much of the port you use. The table takes the cheapest server at each speed and divides its price by what the port can move in 30 days, first at full use and then at 40%, a more typical average for traffic that rises and falls with your audience's day.
| Port | Cheapest server | Per month | TB at 100% | Per TB at 100% | Per TB at 40% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Gbps | Dual Xeon E5 2630 v3 | €209 | 324 | €0.65 | €1.61 |
| 2 Gbps | Dual Xeon E5 2630 v3 | €259 | 648 | €0.40 | €1.00 |
| 5 Gbps | Dual Xeon E5 2630 v3 | €519 | 1,620 | €0.32 | €0.80 |
| 10 Gbps | Dual Xeon E5 2630 v3 | €659 | 3,240 | €0.20 | €0.51 |
| 20 Gbps | Dual Xeon E5 2630 v3 | €1,159 | 6,480 | €0.18 | €0.45 |
| 25 Gbps | Dual Xeon Gold 6148 | €1,799 | 8,100 | €0.22 | €0.56 |
Two things stand out. A terabyte through a 10 Gbps port costs about a third of what it costs through a 1 Gbps port at the same utilisation. And the step from 5 to 10 Gbps adds only €140 a month for twice the capacity, which makes it the best value jump in the whole range. For comparison, metered cloud egress is usually billed per gigabyte, which puts a terabyte in the tens of euros rather than the tens of cents.
How much traffic actually needs 10 Gbps
Ports are sized for the busiest hour, not the monthly total. Because traffic follows your audience's day, the peak often runs at around twice the monthly average. Using that rule of thumb:
| Monthly transfer | Average rate | Peak at twice the average | Port to buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 TB | 0.31 Gbps | 0.62 Gbps | 1 Gbps |
| 250 TB | 0.77 Gbps | 1.54 Gbps | 2 Gbps |
| 500 TB | 1.54 Gbps | 3.09 Gbps | 5 Gbps |
| 1,000 TB | 3.09 Gbps | 6.17 Gbps | 10 Gbps |
| 1,500 TB | 4.63 Gbps | 9.26 Gbps | 10 Gbps with little headroom, or 20 Gbps |
| 2,000 TB | 6.17 Gbps | 12.35 Gbps | 20 Gbps |
If your traffic is spikier than that, for example live events or game launches where most of the month's bytes leave in a few evenings, size the port to the spike. If you are used to providers who bill the 95th percentile, our guide to 95th percentile and unmetered billing explains how the two models compare.
Filling 10 Gbps takes more than the port
Plenty of 10 Gbps servers spend their lives at 2 Gbps because something else in the chain is the bottleneck. The usual suspects:
- One connection is not enough. A single TCP flow is limited by its window and by the round trip time. At 10 Gbps over a 100 ms path, roughly Europe to the US East Coast, 125 MB has to be in flight at once, far more than many default Linux settings allow. Raise the socket buffer limits, switch congestion control to BBR, and expect real throughput to come from many connections in parallel rather than one.
- Disks can be slower than the network. A single SATA SSD reads around 500 to 550 MB per second, which is roughly 4 Gbps. Our Xeon servers ship with one 240 GB SSD, so for file delivery at 10 Gbps add the six drive option (six 1 TB SSDs for €69 a month) or keep the popular files in RAM. The EPYC builds start with two 1 TB NVMe drives.
- Encryption costs CPU. Serving plain files is cheap, but every HTTPS byte is encrypted, and that work must be spread across cores. Benchmark with real TLS traffic, not just a raw throughput test.
- The far end matters. Measure with iperf3 using several parallel streams against more than one destination. A single slow test target tells you about that target, not about your port.
Who should buy 10 Gbps, and who should not
A 10 Gbps port pays for itself for video origins and live streaming with thousands of concurrent viewers, software and game update distribution, backup targets that receive from many sites at the same moment, your own CDN edge nodes, and bulk data transfer between sites. The 1,000 TB a month row above is the typical entry point.
Most websites, APIs and SaaS backends never come close. A 1 Gbps unmetered port can move 324 TB a month on its own, and most online shops use a small fraction of that. If that sounds like you, start with the 1 Gbps or 2 Gbps tier, and ask us about a bigger port when your graphs say so.
What about a 10 Gbps VPS?
Our streaming VPS plans also sit on 10 Gbps ports and start at €9.99 a month, but that port is shared with the other virtual servers on the node. Each plan lists an estimated minimum, from 1 to 2 Gbps on the smallest plan up to 5 to 6 Gbps on the largest. If your peaks fit inside that, a VPS is by far the cheaper answer, and we went through the numbers in this post on unmetered streaming VPS. A dedicated port is the step for when the estimate is no longer enough and the full 10 Gbps has to be yours.
Ordering a 10 Gbps server
- Open the 10 Gbps dedicated server page and pick a chassis.
- Choose a country: Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain or the United States.
- Add drives and extra IPv4 addresses if you need them, then check out. The delivery estimate is shown before you pay.
Need 10 Gbps in one particular city, or want a second opinion on a traffic profile before you commit? Open a ticket or start a live chat. The people who answer are the people who run the network.