Where the Xeon E5 platform stops: 20Gbps servers
Three Dual Xeon E5 builds, 16 to 44 cores, on the fastest port the platform will ever take. Guaranteed 20Gbps from €1159 a month.
X-ZoneServers 20 Gbps dedicated servers start at €1159 per month for a guaranteed 20 Gbps port — 3 bare-metal configurations with up to 6.48 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.
Every server platform has a last configuration, and for the Intel Xeon E5 line this tier is it. Three machines reach the 20Gbps guaranteed port and all three of them are Dual Xeon E5, starting at €1159 a month. Nothing in the E5 catalogue goes above this, which quietly changes what you are buying. You are not paying for a faster port bolted onto the same platform you could have had one tier down. You are buying the top configuration of a platform that stops here, and the top of a platform is always priced against what replaces it rather than against what came before it. That is why the three builds sit so close together on price, and why a guaranteed gigabit has never cost less on this generation of Xeon. If your stack is tuned for a well understood Xeon socket and DDR4, this is the last stop on that road and the best value stop on it.
What the final E5 port moves in a month
A committed 20Gbps port carries 2500 MB/s of payload, and it is committed rather than shared, so that figure holds at four in the morning and at the worst minute of your week. Held flat across a 30-day month it clears 6.48 PB. A 1 TB dataset leaves the machine in 6 minutes 40 seconds at line rate, which is the number to reach for when you are seeding a new edge node or pulling a full set back to origin. There are no overage charges inside the tier, because the 20Gbps is a commitment rather than a threshold you get billed for approaching. One thing worth knowing before you compare the three builds: capacity here is a property of the tier, not of the machine. The 16-core server and the 44-core server move exactly the same volume. The cores decide what you can do to the traffic on its way through, not how much of it you are entitled to.
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 20Gbps
Three machines are offered. Dual Xeon E5-2630v3, 16c/32t at 2.4GHz, 128GB DDR4-2133 and six SSD bays, at €1159. Dual Xeon E5-2690v4, 28c/56t at 2.6GHz, the same memory and the same chassis, at €1179, and the one marked popular. Dual Xeon E5-2699v4, 44c/88t at 2.2GHz with 256GB DDR4-2133, at €1249. No AMD EPYC build is offered at 20Gbps. Watch the clock speeds as you read down that list, because they fall: the 44-core part runs at 2.2GHz against 2.6GHz on the 28-core, so paying more buys parallel width, not faster single-threaded work. Storage type and capacity, memory, and the operating system are all chosen at order time within what the platform supports, and any configuration outside the standard three is quoted on request.
Dual Xeon E5-2630v3
Entry Level
Dual Xeon E5-2690v4
Popular Choice
Dual Xeon E5-2699v4
High Performance
What a 20Gbps server is for
Live and on-demand video origin
Serve 4000 simultaneous 1080p viewers at 5 Mbps from a single chassis, with the 28-core E5-2690v4 handling packaging and repackaging while the port stays saturated.
4K catalogue delivery
At 25 Mbps a stream, this port carries 800 concurrent 4K sessions. The 44-core E5-2699v4 and its 256GB of DDR4 exist for exactly this shape of work, where every session wants a slice of CPU.
Public mirrors and patch distribution
Release day traffic is scheduling rather than computation, so the 16-core E5-2630v3 at the bottom of this tier is usually the right pick. What matters is that the committed port does not thin out while every client in Europe arrives at once.
Folding two 10Gbps servers into one
Two servers at the 10Gbps tier cost €1318 a month between them and give you two of everything to patch. One machine here costs €1159, presents one address, and puts every core behind a single committed port.
€90 separates 16 cores from 44 cores
Read the three prices in order and the shape of this tier gives itself away. €1159 buys 16 cores and 32 threads. €1249 buys 44 cores and 88 threads. The entire spread is €90, under eight percent, for close to triple the core count. Live platforms are not priced like that. Ends of platforms are: the committed port is the scarce item, the silicon behind it has finished its commercial life, and so the cost of a guaranteed gigabit settles at €57.95 here, the lowest it ever reaches on the E5 line. One tier down, the same generation of Xeon asks €65.9 per guaranteed gigabit. Everything the catalogue offers after the E5 line is priced as current-platform hardware, so this ratio is not a step on a curve you can keep walking down. The practical consequence is an unusual piece of advice: do not shop for the cheapest build here. The €90 between the entry machine and the 44-core machine is the least consequential €90 in the catalogue, and the jump from 128GB to 256GB of DDR4 that comes with it will outlive the decision.
Who should stay at 10Gbps
Stay at 10Gbps if your measured peak still fits inside it. That tier starts at €659 and carries 3.24 PB across a 30-day month, and stepping up to here costs €500 more every month. Buy the larger port when your traffic graph has started flat-topping, not because the next number up reads better on a spec sheet. If your growth is in cores rather than in egress, a bigger E5 build at 10Gbps is the cheaper answer.
See 10Gbps serversThe trigger for 25Gbps
Step up when sustained demand passes what this port commits, or when the workload needs more machine than the E5 line can be configured to hold. The 25Gbps tier starts at €1799, which is €640 above the entry price here, and commits 8.1 PB over a 30-day month. Budget for the platform change as well as the port, because at that tier the catalogue leaves the E5 socket behind entirely.
See 25Gbps serversAll guaranteed bandwidth tiers
The same hardware range is sold at nine committed port speeds. Compare the entry price of each.
20Gbps dedicated server questions
Why is there only €90 between the 16-core build and the 44-core build?
Does buying the end of a platform mean buying obsolete hardware?
What happens when my traffic outgrows what the E5 platform can serve?
How does the move to the Xeon Gold and EPYC line actually work?
Does DDR4-2133 hold this tier back compared with DDR5-4800?
Take the top of the E5 line
Three Dual Xeon E5 builds, a guaranteed 20Gbps port, and about an hour from order to login. Tell us which of the three you want, or describe the configuration you need and we will quote it.