100Gbps Dedicated Servers: The Hardware Is the Easy Half
A guaranteed 100 Gbps port is the easy half of this purchase. Making a general-purpose Linux server saturate one is a memory placement and interrupt routing job, and that work is now yours.
X-ZoneServers 100 Gbps dedicated servers start at €4499 per month for a guaranteed 100 Gbps port — 3 bare-metal configurations with up to 32.4 PB of monthly transfer across 12 EU and US datacenter locations. The port is effectively unmetered: hold the full committed rate around the clock, with no overage charges and no fair-use throttling inside your tier.
Bandwidth is the cheap part of this tier. What it costs to move a packet has never been lower on our price list, and the chassis we install will accept a 100 Gbps port without complaint. The awkward truth is that no mainstream operating system ships ready to fill one. A default Linux install, with its interrupts landing wherever the scheduler feels like putting them and its socket buffers sized for a link from a decade ago, will typically stall somewhere in the tens of gigabits and stay there no matter how much CPU you throw at it. Reaching line rate is an exercise in where memory sits and which core handles the interrupt, long before it is an exercise in raw core count. Three configurations are offered here, and the right one depends less on the port, which is identical across all three, than on what your software does with each packet after it arrives.
What the port carries once the stack cooperates
At line rate the port moves 12500 MB/s of payload. That puts a 1 TB dataset across the wire in 1 minute 20 seconds and adds up to 32.4 PB over a 30-day month at full utilisation. In streaming terms it is 20000 simultaneous 1080p viewers at 5 Mbps, or 4000 viewers at 4K and 25 Mbps. Those figures describe the port, and the port is guaranteed, so nothing on our side throttles or charges extra within the tier. What arrives at your application is a separate question, decided by how the receive queues are spread across cores, which NUMA node holds the buffer a packet lands in, and how many times that packet is copied before your process sees it. The rest of this page is about closing that difference.
Figures use decimal units (1 Gbps = 125 MB/s) across a 30-day month, at 5 Mbps per 1080p stream and 25 Mbps per 4K stream. They describe what the port can carry, not a guarantee of application throughput: disk, CPU and the far end all apply their own limits.
3 configurations at 100Gbps
The Dual Xeon Gold 6148 at €4499 brings 40 cores and 80 threads at 2.4GHz, 256GB of DDR4-2133 and six SSD bays. The Dual EPYC 9554 at €7379 steps up to 128 cores and 256 threads at 3.1GHz, 512GB of DDR5-4800 and 24 NVMe slots. The Dual EPYC 9754 at €7939 is the ULTIMATE build with 256 cores, 512 threads and 1024GB of DDR5-4800. The EPYC 9254 chassis are absent because their port options stop at 50Gbps. Memory generation is the specification to weigh here rather than clock speed, because every copy in the packet path costs both a read and a write, so the memory bandwidth you need is a multiple of the wire rate and not equal to it. All three builds are dual socket, which means two NUMA nodes and a network card physically attached to the lanes of only one of them. That single fact drives most of the tuning described below, whichever chassis you pick.
Dual Xeon Gold 6148
Ultimate Performance
Dual EPYC 9554
Ultimate Performance
Dual EPYC 9754
Maximum Performance
What a 100Gbps server is for
Cache and origin fleets serving large objects
The one shape of traffic that gets close to line rate with modest effort, because the kernel can hand whole files to the card with few copies. Spend your tuning budget on connection setup and TLS termination rather than on the payload path.
Packet inspection, scrubbing and traffic analytics
Anything that examines every packet rather than every file runs into per-packet kernel cost long before it runs into the port. Plan for a bypass framework and dedicated poll mode cores from the first day, not as a later optimisation.
NVMe storage targets and backup landing zones
NVMe-oF and object backends only hold their throughput when drive queues, network queues and memory all sit on the same NUMA node, which is why the 24-slot EPYC chassis are the sensible starting point for this role.
Dataset staging between sites and clusters
Moving training corpora or research archives between locations turns a working day into a coffee break, but only if the transfer tool is NUMA aware and does not funnel every byte through a single core near the wrong socket.
€44.99 per gigabit, and what the saving still costs you
At €4499 a month for a guaranteed 100 Gbps port, each gigabit costs €44.99. That is the lowest bandwidth price we publish, and it is a floor rather than a point on a straight line, which is why this tier is worth reaching for even if you expect to run it at half load through the first year. The saving is real, but it is not free money. Assume some engineer time for stack tuning, and possibly a licence or two if you take the bypass route, before the port earns the figure on the invoice. Budget it honestly and the arithmetic still works: the tuning is a one-off cost paid in days, while the price per gigabit is paid every month for as long as the server runs. What you should not do is buy this tier, install a stock image, measure 30 Gbps and conclude that the port is not there.
Stay on 50Gbps if the tuning has not happened yet
The 50Gbps tier starts at €2799, so this one costs €1700 a month more. If your current servers have never been pushed beyond a stock configuration, that €1700 buys capacity you cannot yet reach, and the honest advice is to spend a fortnight on interrupt and memory placement first. Teams sitting comfortably inside a 16.2 PB monthly ceiling should also stay where they are.
See 50Gbps serversStep up to 200Gbps when tuning stops paying back
Traffic growth alone is not the trigger. Move to 200Gbps, from €12879 and so €8380 a month above this tier, when your stack is already tuned, your cores are already pinned, and the port is still the thing you hit, or when your projections genuinely call for the 64.8 PB a month it allows. Note that each gigabit costs €64.39 up there. The step buys capacity, not efficiency.
See 200Gbps serversAll guaranteed bandwidth tiers
The same hardware range is sold at nine committed port speeds. Compare the entry price of each.
100Gbps dedicated server questions
What does a server actually need in software to reach 100 Gbps?
Why does NUMA placement matter so much at this rate?
Can the Dual Xeon Gold 6148 drive this port as well as the EPYC builds?
When is a kernel bypass framework such as DPDK worth the trouble?
How do I tell whether the port or my own software is the limit?
Tell us what your traffic looks like
Describe your workload to our system administrators, packets or files, and we will tell you which of the three builds fits and what the stack will need doing. Custom CPU, memory to 1TB DDR5, storage and bandwidth tier are quoted on request, and machines are online in about an hour.