1Gbps Dedicated Servers: Where To Start, And Where You Grow
Seven bare-metal configurations from €209 a month, with eight upgrade paths still ahead of you. This page is about working out which one you will actually need.
X-ZoneServers 1 Gbps dedicated servers start at €209 per month for a guaranteed 1 Gbps port — 7 bare-metal configurations with up to 324 TB 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.
Most people arriving here have never run a machine of their own and cannot yet say what it will be asked to do in a year. That is not a problem to be solved before you order. It is the normal condition of a first server, and it is exactly why an entry rung exists. What matters is that you leave this page knowing which measurements to take once the machine is live, because the ladder above you is not one road with nine markers on it. It branches. Some customers grow in the number of people watching at once. Some grow in the sheer weight of bytes they push out of cold storage. Some grow in how many separate conversations the machine is holding open at any instant. Some grow only in how much work each request costs the processor, which is not a network question at all. Those four are different diseases with different cures, and telling them apart is a matter of instrumentation rather than intuition. Read this as a diagnostic. We will describe what each kind of growth looks like from the inside, name where each one leads, and say honestly that for most readers the answer after twelve months of measuring is that nothing has moved and the sensible thing is to stay put.
What 125 MB/s Actually Delivers
A gigabit port moves 125 MB/s. Held open for a thirty-day month that comes to 324 TB of guaranteed transfer, committed to your machine rather than borrowed from a shared pool, with no overage charge inside the tier. Put in front of an audience, 125 MB/s carries roughly 200 simultaneous 1080p streams at 5 Mbps each, or 40 concurrent 4K streams at 25 Mbps. A single terabyte leaves the machine in 2 hours and 13 minutes if nothing else is competing for the line. Those three numbers are worth writing on a card and pinning up, because they are the reference points you will measure yourself against later. The useful question is not whether 324 TB sounds large. It is which of the three ceilings you approach first. A site that serves 200 viewers at once and never touches 324 TB is hitting a concurrency ceiling. A backup target that pushes 150 TB in its nightly windows and serves nobody during the day is hitting a volume ceiling. A machine that is nowhere near either but whose processors sit pinned at full load is hitting neither, and no change of port speed will help it. The same port, the same 324 TB, three completely different situations. That distinction is the whole content of this page.
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.
7 configurations at 1Gbps
The line-up starts with the Dual Xeon E5-2630v3 at €209, 16 cores and 32 threads at 2.4GHz, 128GB of DDR4 and six SSDs. The Dual Xeon E5-2690v4 at €229 is the most-chosen build, and the reason is visible in the spread, 28 cores and 56 threads at 2.6GHz for twenty euros more. The Dual Xeon E5-2699v4 at €299 takes that to 44 cores and 88 threads at 2.2GHz with 256GB of DDR4. Then the platform changes. The Single EPYC 9254 at €449 brings 24 cores and 48 threads at 2.9GHz, DDR5 memory and ten NVMe drives in place of six SSDs. The Dual EPYC 9254 at €679 doubles that to 48 cores and 96 threads with 256GB. The Dual EPYC 9554 at €959 reaches 128 cores and 256 threads at 3.1GHz with 512GB of DDR5 and 24 NVMe drives, and the Dual EPYC 9754 at €1519 is the ultimate build here, 256 cores and 512 threads at 2.3GHz with a full 1TB of DDR5. Read that ladder as the answer to compute growth specifically. If your fourth measurement is the one that moved, you climb this list and your port stays exactly where it is. CPU, memory to 1TB DDR5, storage, bandwidth tier and operating system are all customisable, and anything outside these seven is quoted on request.
Dual Xeon E5-2630v3
Entry Level
Dual Xeon E5-2690v4
Popular Choice
Dual Xeon E5-2699v4
High Performance
Single EPYC 9254
Entry Level
Dual EPYC 9254
High Performance
Dual EPYC 9554
Ultimate Performance
Dual EPYC 9754
Maximum Performance
What a 1Gbps server is for
A first production website or application
Traffic in the low hundreds of concurrent users, a database, an application runtime, and cache all on one machine. The usual first move off shared hosting, and the workload most likely to sit here for years without needing anything faster.
Game servers and small community platforms
Latency matters more than raw throughput here. Bare metal with AI-optimized BGP routing and up to 1Tbps of DDoS protection removes the two things that most often ruin a community server, long or unstable network paths and volumetric attacks.
Build agents, CI runners and batch processing
Compute-bound work that barely touches the network. A 44-core Xeon or a 256-thread EPYC at this tier costs far less than the same silicon further up the ladder, because you are not paying for a port you will never fill.
Overnight backup windows
Overnight transfer windows where nobody is watching and only the total matters. A 12-hour nightly window carries about 162 TB a month at line rate, with 1 TB landing in 2 hours 13 minutes, which covers most small and mid-sized replication schedules comfortably.
Four Directions Of Growth, And How To Recognise Yours
Growth in concurrent viewers shows up as a rising peak with a flat total. Your monthly transfer barely moves, but the busy hour gets busier and gets closer to the 200-stream or 40-stream figure. This is the direction that leads straight up the port ladder, one rung at a time, and it is the most common reason anyone ever leaves the entry tier. Growth in stored bytes served cold looks like the opposite shape. Peaks stay where they were, but the monthly total climbs steadily as your library grows and older material keeps being requested. This one runs out of month before it runs out of port, and it keeps going until the machine's own disks become the limit rather than the line, which is the territory of the 5Gbps page and is argued properly there. Growth in simultaneous sessions is the one that hides. Neither peak bandwidth nor monthly volume need move at all while the count of connections held open quietly doubles, and the symptom arrives as timeouts and refused connections rather than a full line. That path leads a long way up, to the 50Gbps page, which treats session count as the sizing input. Growth in per-machine compute is the fourth, and it is the one that changes nothing about your port. Load average climbs, response times lengthen, the network graph stays flat. The answer is a larger chassis at this same tier, and there are six of them above the €209 entry build, ending at 256 cores and 1TB of DDR5 for €1519. That is a move within the page you are reading, not a move off it. Instrument all four. Most readers will find that after a year exactly none of them has moved, and staying here is the correct decision rather than a timid one.
All guaranteed bandwidth tiers
The same hardware range is sold at nine committed port speeds. Compare the entry price of each.
1Gbps dedicated server questions
My busy hour peaks at 90 MB/s of the 125 available. Is that a reason to move or a reason to keep measuring?
Is a saturated gigabit or a pinned processor the more common reason a first dedicated server gets replaced?
My network graph is flat well under 125 MB/s but the service still feels slow. What does that tell me?
How long does an entry machine typically serve before one of these actually moves?
What does a year of flat measurements on an entry gigabit actually prove?
Is a 1Gbps guaranteed port the same as an unmetered 1Gbps server?
Start Here And Measure From Day One
Pick a chassis, deploy in about an hour in any of our twelve locations, and start recording peaks from the first day. Billed monthly with a 99.9% uptime SLA and 24/7 support from our own system administrators. Talk to us if you want a build outside the seven.