At 5Gbps, the Disk Runs Out Before the Port Does
Guaranteed 5Gbps across twelve locations, and a chassis choice that decides whether cold reads can keep up with the port you are paying for.
X-ZoneServers 5 Gbps dedicated servers start at €519 per month for a guaranteed 5 Gbps port — 7 bare-metal configurations with up to 1.62 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.
Most capacity questions stop at the port. This one should not. A guaranteed 5Gbps link asks your machine for 625 MB/s of payload every second, for as long as the traffic lasts, and that figure sits squarely in the range where the storage subsystem starts to matter more than the network card. If the bytes are already in memory, any of the seven builds on this page will hold the line without effort. If the bytes are on disk and the requests arrive in no particular order, a six-bay SATA SSD chassis and a ten or twenty-four bay NVMe chassis behave like different products. That difference, not the port rating, is what you are really choosing between here.
What the Port Asks For, and Who Has to Answer It
Held flat across a 30-day month, this tier moves 1.62 PB. A single terabyte crosses the wire in 26 minutes and 40 seconds. In streaming terms it supports 1000 concurrent 1080p viewers at 5 Mbps, or 200 concurrent 4K viewers at 25 Mbps. Read those three figures as demands on your array rather than as headline ceilings, because the network side of each is identical and the storage side is not. A thousand viewers are a thousand independent read positions in your library, and unless the popular titles are resident in page cache, most of those positions are a seek. The terabyte transfer is the gentle case: it is one long sequential read, and every array here handles sequential reads well. The 4K sessions sit in between, fewer streams but much larger blocks and a working set that grows faster than memory does. The uplink delivers all three the same way. Your disks will not.
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 5Gbps
Three of the seven builds share one storage layout: six SATA SSD slots. The dual Xeon E5-2630v3 at €519 brings 16 cores and 32 threads with 128GB of DDR4-2133. The dual Xeon E5-2690v4 at €539, our popular pick, brings 28 cores and 56 threads on the same 128GB. The dual Xeon E5-2699v4 at €609 brings 44 cores and 88 threads with 256GB. Note that the extra cores buy you no extra bays. The EPYC side changes the geometry entirely. The single EPYC 9254 at €769 with 24 cores and 48 threads, and the dual EPYC 9254 at €999 with 48 cores and 96 threads, both carry ten NVMe slots backed by DDR5-4800. The dual EPYC 9554 at €1279 carries 24 NVMe slots and 512GB, and the dual EPYC 9754 at €1839, our ultimate configuration, carries 24 slots and a full 1024GB. Choose on bays and memory first, cores second.
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 5Gbps server is for
Long-Tail Video Libraries
A catalogue larger than memory turns every unpopular title into a cold read, and the tail is exactly where requests scatter. Ten NVMe bays absorb that scatter. Six SATA bays begin to queue behind it.
Restore-Heavy Backup Targets
Ingest is sequential and easy. Restores are not. Several customers pulling different archives at once is random read at full rate, and that is precisely where bay count and queue depth decide the result.
Patch Day Asset Distribution
A new build pushes one hot working set at everybody simultaneously. Either it fits in memory, and the entry chassis holds the port comfortably, or it does not, and NVMe is the difference between line rate and a disk-bound plateau.
Public-Facing Read Replicas
Serving query results to the open internet mixes small random reads with occasional large scans. Once the index outgrows cache, sustained delivery becomes a property of the storage layout rather than of the uplink.
The Price of the Port, and the Price of Delivering It
Entry is €519 per month, which works out at €103.8 per Gbps of guaranteed port. That is the number to start from, but it is not the number to decide on. If your working set fits inside the entry chassis's memory, €519 buys the whole tier and nothing is stranded. If it does not, the comparison that actually matters is €519 against €769 for the single EPYC 9254, the cheapest build here with NVMe bays, because that €250 is what turns a port rating into a delivered rate on cold data. Everything above it in the range buys cores, memory and bays rather than a faster link, since all seven configurations carry the same 5Gbps commitment with no overage charges inside the tier. So budget in two parts. Decide the port first, because it is fixed and cheap to reason about. Then decide how much of it you intend to serve from disk, and let that set the chassis. Buying the port twice over is the expensive mistake, and it is the one nobody notices until the traffic is real.
Stay on 2Gbps If Your Reads Are Already Comfortable
The 2Gbps tier starts at €259, which is €260 below this entry. Stay there if your read pattern is well cached and your peaks are modest, because 648 TB a month is a great deal of delivery and a six-bay SATA array is untroubled at that rate even when reads go cold. Move up only once the storage side is comfortable and the port has become the thing you are waiting on.
See 2Gbps serversStep Up to 10Gbps When the Array Outruns the Port
The 10Gbps tier starts at €659, €140 above this entry, at €65.9 per Gbps. The trigger is not traffic growth on its own. Step up once you have already paid for NVMe bays and your array is capable of delivering more than the port will carry, because only then is the uplink the remaining constraint. Ordering 10Gbps onto a six-bay SATA chassis relocates the queue rather than shortening it.
See 10Gbps serversAll guaranteed bandwidth tiers
The same hardware range is sold at nine committed port speeds. Compare the entry price of each.
5Gbps dedicated server questions
Can six SATA SSDs actually serve this tier?
How much RAM do I need before the disk stops mattering?
Which RAID layout gives the best read throughput?
Why might the cheapest chassis not sustain the tier from disk?
Do filesystem and readahead settings change anything here?
Tell Us the Access Pattern, Not Just the Traffic
Send us your working set size, average object size and read mix, and we will tell you which of the seven builds sustains 5Gbps from disk rather than only from cache. Custom CPU, memory to 1TB DDR5, storage and OS quoted on request, with deployment in about an hour.