The Short Version
Stop looking for “unlimited bandwidth.” It does not exist. What you want is either unmetered (no cap, port-speed-limited) or high-cap (a large, stated number). BuyVM at $3.50/mo gives you an unmetered 1Gbps port — use it 24/7, no questions asked, no throttling, theoretical max ~330TB/month. Hetzner at $4.59/mo gives you 20TB at 1Gbps with $1.19/TB overage — the most honest high-cap deal available. Everything else is either more expensive per TB, slower per connection, or hiding behind fine print.
Table of Contents
- The Anatomy of “Unlimited” — What the TOS Actually Says
- Bandwidth vs Transfer: The Terminology Trick
- Four Bandwidth Pricing Models Compared
- #1. BuyVM — The Only Provider That Means It ($3.50/mo)
- #2. Hetzner — 20TB at 1Gbps, No Games ($4.59/mo)
- #3. Contabo — 32TB with a 200Mbps Asterisk ($6.99/mo)
- #4. InterServer — 2TB with a Price-Lock ($6/mo)
- #5. Hostinger — 4TB with the Fastest Disk ($6.49/mo)
- The Real Numbers: Comparison Table
- Cost-Per-TB Breakdown
- How I Tested: 7 Days of Sustained Traffic
- FAQ (9 Questions)
The Anatomy of “Unlimited” — What the TOS Actually Says
I have a hobby that is probably unhealthy: reading VPS terms of service documents. Most people click “I agree” and move on. I actually read them. And the bandwidth sections are where the marketing department and the legal department stop pretending to agree with each other.
Here is the pattern. The landing page says “Unlimited Bandwidth.” Sometimes in bold. Sometimes with an exclamation mark. Then you find the TOS, usually three clicks deep, and you see language like this:
That is a fair use policy. It means: we will not bill you for overages, but we will slow you down or cut you off when we decide you’ve used too much. The threshold is “deemed to be excessive” — which means whatever the provider decides it is that day. It is not a number you can plan around. It is not in your SLA. It is a unilateral right the provider grants themselves to redefine the product you are paying for.
I have seen fair use enforcement triggered at volumes as low as 3TB/month and as high as 15TB/month, depending on the provider, the network segment, and apparently the phase of the moon. The enforcement is inconsistent because the threshold is not technical — it is financial. When the provider’s margin on your account turns negative, that is when “unlimited” finds its limit.
Three types of providers survive this scrutiny:
- Unmetered providers — They give you a port speed and let you saturate it. No transfer cap. No fair use clause. The port speed is the limit, and it’s an honest one. BuyVM is the standout.
- High-cap providers — They state a large number (20-32TB), charge a known overage rate, and let you plan accordingly. Hetzner and Contabo do this.
- Honest capped providers — They state a modest number (2-4TB), charge overage or suspend service, and do not pretend the cap does not exist. InterServer and Hostinger fall here.
The fourth category — providers who say “unlimited” and bury a fair use policy in the TOS — is not represented in this comparison. I do not recommend them. If a provider’s marketing and legal departments cannot agree on what they’re selling you, that is not a provider you should trust with production traffic.
Bandwidth vs Transfer: The Terminology Trick That Costs You Money
The VPS industry uses “bandwidth” and “transfer” interchangeably. They are not the same thing, and confusing them is how providers sell you less than you think you are buying.
Bandwidth is a rate. It is how fast data moves at any given moment, measured in megabits or gigabits per second. When your VPS has a “1Gbps port,” that is bandwidth — the maximum speed at which data can flow in or out of your server at any instant. Think of it as the diameter of a pipe.
Transfer (sometimes called “traffic”) is a volume. It is how much total data moves during a billing period, measured in terabytes per month. When Hetzner says “20TB included,” that is transfer — the total amount of water that can flow through the pipe this month. Port speed determines how fast; transfer cap determines how much.
Here is why this distinction matters:
| Metric | Bandwidth (Rate) | Transfer (Volume) |
|---|---|---|
| Unit | Mbps / Gbps | GB / TB per month |
| Analogy | Pipe diameter | Monthly water allowance |
| VPS example | 1 Gbps port speed | 20 TB/month included |
| What limits it | Physical network interface | Provider billing policy |
| When you hit it | Individual downloads feel slow | Monthly bill spikes or service suspended |
A provider can offer “unlimited transfer” while limiting bandwidth to 200Mbps — which is exactly what Contabo does. You will never hit the 32TB transfer cap at 200Mbps under normal use, because the pipe is too narrow to move that much water. The “generous cap” is partially a function of the restrictive port speed. That is not dishonest — Contabo is upfront about both numbers — but it is something you need to understand before comparing providers. See our 10Gbps VPS guide if raw speed matters more than total volume.
When a provider says “unlimited bandwidth,” ask: unlimited what? Unlimited rate (port speed)? No — that is always physically limited. Unlimited volume (transfer)? Also no — fair use policy. The word “unlimited” is applied to whichever metric sounds better while the other metric does the actual limiting.
Four Bandwidth Pricing Models — And What Each One Really Costs
Not all bandwidth is priced the same way, and the pricing model determines your actual cost more than the headline number. I have categorized every VPS provider’s approach into four models:
Model 1: Unmetered (Port-Speed-Limited)
You get a port speed. Use it however you want. No transfer cap, no overage, no fair use. The port speed is the product.
Example: BuyVM — 1Gbps unmetered at $3.50/mo. Theoretical max: ~330TB/month. Effective cost per TB: ~$0.01.
Best for: VPN servers, file mirrors, backup targets, CDN origins, anything where bandwidth is the primary resource.
Model 2: High-Cap with Transparent Overage
You get a large transfer allowance (10-32TB) and pay a known rate if you exceed it. Predictable and plannable.
Examples: Hetzner (20TB, $1.19/TB overage), Contabo (32TB, $1.30/TB overage).
Best for: Production websites, ecommerce stores, media-heavy applications where you can estimate monthly transfer.
Model 3: Low-Cap with Expensive Overage
You get 1-4TB and pay premium rates for additional transfer. The base price looks competitive until you go over.
Example: InterServer — 2TB included, $10/TB overage. Exceeding by just 5TB costs $50/month in overages.
Best for: Low-traffic sites, development environments, workloads with predictable and modest bandwidth needs.
Model 4: “Unlimited” with Hidden Fair Use
The headline says unlimited. The TOS says otherwise. You cannot plan around a number that does not exist in writing.
Best for: Nobody who has read this far.
The cost difference between these models is not trivial. Let me put real numbers on it:
| Monthly Transfer | BuyVM (Unmetered) | Hetzner (20TB cap) | Contabo (32TB cap) | InterServer (2TB cap) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 TB | $3.50 | $4.59 | $6.99 | $6.00 |
| 10 TB | $3.50 | $4.59 | $6.99 | $86.00 |
| 25 TB | $3.50 | $10.54 | $6.99 | $236.00 |
| 50 TB | $3.50 | $40.29 | $30.39 | $486.00 |
At 50TB/month, the difference between BuyVM ($3.50) and InterServer ($486) is $5,820/year. The pricing model is not a minor detail. It is the most important factor in your hosting cost if you use significant bandwidth.
#1. BuyVM — The Only Provider That Means It ($3.50/mo)
I have a simple test for whether a provider’s bandwidth claim is honest: can I run iperf3 at full port speed for seven days straight without a single email from their abuse team? BuyVM passed. Not “passed with a note.” Not “passed after I explained my use case.” Passed completely and silently, because sustained full-port utilization is not abuse on their network — it is the product they are selling.
BuyVM gives you a 1Gbps port. No transfer cap. No fair use policy. No throttling. No overage charges. Saturate it around the clock if your workload demands it. At sustained maximum throughput, that is approximately 330TB/month — over ten times what Contabo caps at, and BuyVM charges less than half the price.
The reason BuyVM can do this is also the reason most people overlook them: everything that is not bandwidth is minimal. The $3.50/mo KVM Slice gives you 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, and 20GB SSD. The control panel is SolusVM, which looks like it was last redesigned when Obama was president. There is no API, no marketplace, no one-click apps, no managed anything. You get SSH access and an unmetered pipe. That is the product.
But BuyVM has a trick that makes them absurdly useful for bandwidth-heavy workloads: Stallion storage slabs. For $1.25/month, you get 256GB of block storage that attaches to your VPS. Need a cheap, high-bandwidth file distribution node? $3.50 for the VPS + $5.00 for 1TB of storage = $8.50/month for an unmetered 1Gbps file server with a terabyte of space. Try pricing that anywhere else.
I ran my 7-day sustained throughput test from their Las Vegas datacenter. The iperf3 results were remarkably flat: 938-944 Mbps sustained, 24 hours a day, all seven days. No dips during business hours. No throttling after I crossed 10TB, 20TB, or 50TB. The line on the graph is boring, and boring is exactly what you want from bandwidth.
What Makes BuyVM Different for Bandwidth
- True unmetered 1Gbps — tested at 938-944 Mbps sustained over 7 days with zero throttling
- No fair use policy, no transfer cap, no overage charges, no asterisks
- $3.50/mo is the lowest entry point in this entire comparison
- Stallion storage slabs ($1.25/256GB) turn it into a cheap bulk file server
- KVM virtualization with dedicated resources — your bandwidth is not shared
The Tradeoffs
- 1GB RAM on base plan — fine for VPN/proxy, too little for most applications
- No API, no Terraform, no infrastructure-as-code workflow
- SolusVM control panel is functional but dated
- Stock availability is a real problem — plans sell out and stay out for weeks
- Support is ticket-only, no live chat, no phone
#2. Hetzner — 20TB at 1Gbps, No Games ($4.59/mo)
If BuyVM is the bandwidth purist’s choice, Hetzner is the pragmatist’s. Twenty terabytes of outbound transfer, a 1Gbps port, inbound traffic completely free and unmetered, and a transparent $1.19/TB overage rate — all starting at $4.59/mo for the CX22 (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 40GB SSD). No fair use ambiguity. No unpublished thresholds. Just a number, clearly stated, with a clear consequence if you exceed it.
What I respect about Hetzner’s approach is that 20TB is genuinely generous for the price tier. Let me contextualize that number. A WordPress site doing 2 million monthly pageviews — which puts it in the top 0.1% of all websites — transfers about 6-8TB. A busy ecommerce store with 500,000 visitors and heavy product imagery might hit 4-5TB. A VPN server with 30 active users doing regular browsing burns through 2-3TB. You would need to be running something intentionally bandwidth-intensive — a download mirror, a video origin server, a large-scale scraping operation — to approach 20TB in a billing cycle.
The 1Gbps port is the real differentiator over Contabo’s 200Mbps. For bursty workloads — a page load that needs to deliver 5MB of assets in under a second, a large file download, an API response to a batch request — the difference between 200Mbps and 1Gbps is the difference between a 200ms transfer and a 40ms transfer. The total volume might be the same, but the user experience is not.
I tested Hetzner’s Ashburn datacenter for the same 7-day period. Port speed was consistent at 925-940 Mbps with no detectable shaping or throttling at any volume. After transferring 18TB in the first 5 days (deliberately pushing close to the cap), I received no warnings, no emails, no speed reduction. Hetzner tracks your usage in the dashboard and charges overage at the end of the billing cycle — cleanly, predictably, like a utility. That is how bandwidth should be sold.
Why Hetzner Works for High-Bandwidth Production
- 20TB at $4.59/mo — $0.23/TB effective cost, cheapest high-cap provider
- 1Gbps port tested at 925-940 Mbps sustained — 5x Contabo’s burst speed
- Inbound traffic is free and unlimited — critical for backup targets and upload-heavy apps
- $1.19/TB overage — cheapest overage rate of any provider tested
- Full API, Terraform provider, CLI tools — infrastructure-as-code ready
- AMD EPYC processors with consistent performance (4% or less CPU variance in testing)
Where It Falls Short
- 20TB is 37% less than Contabo’s 32TB — matters if you’re at that scale
- Only 2 US datacenters (Ashburn, Hillsboro) — no central or southern locations
- Email-only support with no live chat or phone option
- No managed services — you handle everything from OS up
#3. Contabo — 32TB with a 200Mbps Asterisk ($6.99/mo)
Contabo gives you the biggest number in this comparison: 32 terabytes of monthly transfer. And I want to be very specific about why I rank it third despite that headline number, because it illustrates exactly the kind of nuance that the “unlimited bandwidth” marketing machine wants you to ignore.
The 32TB cap is real. Contabo states it clearly, charges $1.30/TB if you exceed it, and does not hide behind fair use language. In terms of honesty, they are above reproach. The issue is the other number: 200Mbps port speed.
At 200Mbps sustained maximum throughput, the theoretical ceiling is about 65TB/month. So the 32TB cap can never be a bottleneck at this port speed under realistic conditions — you would need to run at nearly 50% utilization around the clock to even approach it. The generous transfer cap is partially a consequence of the restrictive port speed. Contabo can afford to give you 32TB because the 200Mbps pipe makes it nearly impossible to use 32TB.
Does that make it a bad deal? Not necessarily. It depends on your traffic pattern.
If your workload is sustained, non-bursty, and latency-tolerant — overnight backup replication, background data sync, low-bitrate audio streaming, batch file transfers that can run for hours — then 200Mbps is plenty of pipe and 32TB is a massive volume allowance. A 10GB file takes 7 minutes at 200Mbps. If that file transfer happening in the background while your application does other things, who cares?
If your workload is bursty — web pages that need to load fast, API responses, on-demand file downloads, anything where a user is waiting — then the 200Mbps port is the real limit, and the 32TB cap is decorative. A 5MB web page takes 200ms to transfer at 200Mbps versus 40ms at 1Gbps. Your users feel that difference.
I tested Contabo’s New York datacenter. The 200Mbps port held steady at 195-198 Mbps — consistent and honest, but ceiling-limited by design. I also measured 15-20% CPU performance variance during peak hours, which compounds with the bandwidth limitation for latency-sensitive workloads. For raw volume at rock-bottom pricing, Contabo delivers. For anything where speed per-request matters, Hetzner’s 1Gbps at $4.59/mo is worth the 12TB trade-off.
The Math: Contabo 200Mbps vs Hetzner 1Gbps
| Transfer Size | Contabo (200 Mbps) | Hetzner (1 Gbps) |
|---|---|---|
| 100 MB file | 4.0 seconds | 0.8 seconds |
| 1 GB file | 40 seconds | 8 seconds |
| 10 GB file | 6.7 minutes | 1.3 minutes |
| 100 GB backup | 1.1 hours | 13.3 minutes |
Where 32TB at 200Mbps Makes Sense
- Highest stated transfer cap of any VPS provider at this price — 32TB is not marketing
- $6.99/mo for 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM — most compute per dollar in this comparison
- Clear overage pricing ($1.30/TB) with no fair use ambiguity
- DDoS protection included at no extra cost
- 3 US datacenters (New York, Seattle, St. Louis) — best geographic coverage
The 200Mbps Reality
- 200Mbps port speed is 5x slower than Hetzner/BuyVM for individual transfers
- 15-20% CPU variance during peak hours compounds latency issues
- No API — all management through web panel only
- $4.99 setup fee on monthly billing (waived on longer terms)
#4. InterServer — 2TB with a Price That Never Changes ($6/mo)
InterServer does not belong in a “high bandwidth” comparison on raw numbers. Two terabytes. That is the included transfer on their $6/mo VPS (1 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 30GB SSD). Contabo includes 16x more. BuyVM includes — well, infinity-x more. So why is InterServer here?
Because most websites use less than 2TB/month, and InterServer offers something no other provider in this comparison does: a price-lock guarantee. The rate you sign up at is the rate you pay forever. Not “for the first term.” Not “subject to annual adjustment.” Forever. In an industry where renewal-rate bait-and-switch is standard operating procedure, InterServer’s pricing honesty on the time axis compensates for their bandwidth limitations on the volume axis.
The overage rate is where InterServer hurts: $10 per terabyte. That is 8.4x more expensive than Hetzner’s $1.19/TB and 7.7x more than Contabo’s $1.30/TB. If you exceed the 2TB cap by even a small margin, the cost compounds fast. 5TB of overage adds $50 to your monthly bill. 10TB of overage adds $100. At those volumes, you should be on a different provider entirely.
But here is the use case where InterServer makes sense: a small business website that gets 100,000-300,000 pageviews/month, expects slow and steady growth over years, and values knowing their hosting cost will never surprise them. The Secaucus, NJ datacenter provides excellent East Coast latency. The 1Gbps port means individual requests are fast. The 2TB cap covers the workload with headroom. And the price-lock means the $6/mo you pay today is the $6/mo you pay in 2030. For WordPress sites with moderate traffic, that predictability has real value.
The Case for InterServer
- Price-lock guarantee — $6/mo today is $6/mo in five years, guaranteed
- 1Gbps port speed — individual requests are fast even if volume cap is low
- Secaucus, NJ datacenter with excellent East Coast and transatlantic latency
- Inter-Shield DDoS protection and security suite included
- 24/7 phone, chat, and email support — most support channels in this comparison
The Bandwidth Limitations
- 2TB included transfer — lowest in this comparison by a wide margin
- $10/TB overage is 8.4x more expensive than Hetzner’s rate
- Only 1 US datacenter (Secaucus, NJ) — no West Coast option
- No NVMe storage on base plans — SSD only
- No API or infrastructure-as-code tooling
#5. Hostinger — 4TB Transfer with the Fastest Disk in the Room ($6.49/mo)
Hostinger’s bandwidth story is not about bandwidth. It is about what bandwidth enables when the rest of the stack is fast enough to keep up.
Four terabytes of included transfer at $6.49/mo is unremarkable next to Contabo’s 32TB or Hetzner’s 20TB. Where Hostinger differentiates is NVMe storage performance: 65,000 IOPS in my testing, the fastest disk I/O of any provider in this comparison. That matters for bandwidth because the storage layer is often the real bottleneck. Having a 1Gbps port is meaningless if your disk can only feed data at 200MB/s. Hostinger’s NVMe layer can saturate the network port — your bandwidth allocation is fully usable, not just theoretical.
The practical implication: if you are serving a WordPress site with heavy media, a Laravel application with large file uploads, or an ecommerce store with thousands of product images, the time-to-first-byte is a function of both network and disk speed. Hostinger delivers on both. Most of the other providers in this list make you choose between bandwidth volume (Contabo, BuyVM) and I/O performance (Hostinger).
Hostinger’s bandwidth scales with plan upgrades: KVM1 gets 4TB, KVM2 ($8.99/mo, 2 vCPU, 8GB RAM) gets 8TB, KVM4 ($12.99/mo) gets 12TB. The scaling is linear and predictable. The overage policy is less clear — Hostinger’s TOS indicates they may throttle or suspend service rather than charge overage, which puts them in a gray area between “honest cap” and “fair use ambiguity.” For workloads that stay within the cap, this is not a problem. For workloads that might spike, the lack of clear overage pricing is a planning risk.
When Disk Speed Matters More Than Transfer Volume
- 65,000 IOPS NVMe — the fastest disk I/O in this entire comparison
- 1Gbps port speed with NVMe fast enough to actually saturate it
- Bandwidth scales linearly with upgrades: 4TB → 8TB → 12TB
- Weekly automatic backups included on all VPS plans
- 24/7 live chat support with consistently fast response times
- 4GB RAM at $6.49/mo — more memory than BuyVM or InterServer at base tier
The Bandwidth Downsides
- 4TB transfer — 8x less than Contabo, 5x less than Hetzner, at a similar price
- Overage policy is vague — throttle or suspend rather than a clear $/TB rate
- Renewal prices increase from introductory rates (check current pricing)
- No bandwidth monitoring API — track usage through the dashboard only
The Real Numbers: Full Comparison Table
No “unlimited” in this table. Just actual numbers you can plan around.
| Provider | Price/mo | Transfer | Port Speed | Overage | CPU/RAM | Storage | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BuyVM | $3.50 | Unmetered | 1 Gbps | None | 1c / 1 GB | 20 GB SSD | Unmetered |
| Hetzner | $4.59 | 20 TB | 1 Gbps | $1.19/TB | 2c / 4 GB | 40 GB SSD | High-cap |
| Contabo | $6.99 | 32 TB | 200 Mbps | $1.30/TB | 4c / 8 GB | 50 GB NVMe | High-cap |
| InterServer | $6.00 | 2 TB | 1 Gbps | $10/TB | 1c / 2 GB | 30 GB SSD | Low-cap |
| Hostinger | $6.49 | 4 TB | 1 Gbps | Throttle/Suspend | 1c / 4 GB | 50 GB NVMe | Capped |
Cost-Per-TB: The Number That Actually Matters
If bandwidth is your primary resource, the metric that matters is not the headline transfer cap or the base price. It is cost per terabyte actually used. This table puts every provider on equal footing:
| Provider | Included Transfer | Cost/TB (Included) | Cost/TB (Overage) | Cost at 30TB/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BuyVM | Unmetered (~330TB) | ~$0.01 | N/A | $3.50 |
| Hetzner | 20 TB | $0.23 | $1.19 | $16.49 |
| Contabo | 32 TB | $0.22 | $1.30 | $6.99 |
| Hostinger | 4 TB | $1.62 | Unknown | Service may be suspended |
| InterServer | 2 TB | $3.00 | $10.00 | $286.00 |
At 30TB/month, the annual cost difference between BuyVM ($42) and InterServer ($3,432) is $3,390. That is not a rounding error. That is the cost of choosing a provider based on the wrong metric. Our VPS calculator can help you estimate your actual monthly transfer needs.
How I Tested: 7 Days of Sustained Traffic
Marketing copy is easy to write. Fair use policies are easy to bury. The only way to know what a provider’s bandwidth actually delivers is to use it — aggressively, continuously, for long enough that any hidden throttling reveals itself. Here is what I did:
Test Protocol
- Duration: 7 consecutive days per provider, running 24/7
- Tool: iperf3 running in continuous mode, logging throughput every 10 seconds
- Throttle detection: Automated alerts for any sustained speed drop exceeding 5% from baseline, monitored at 50%, 75%, and 90% of stated transfer cap
- Peak vs off-peak: Speed measurements every 4 hours to detect time-of-day congestion patterns
- Real workload validation: Serving a 10GB test file via nginx to 100 concurrent HTTP connections from geographically distributed clients
- TOS review: Reading the complete terms of service for each provider, specifically the bandwidth/network/fair use sections, and flagging any language that grants unilateral throttling rights
What I Found
BuyVM (Las Vegas): 938-944 Mbps sustained. Zero throttling at any volume. No speed variation between peak and off-peak. No communication from provider at any point during the test. This is what “unmetered” looks like when a provider actually means it.
Hetzner (Ashburn): 925-940 Mbps sustained. No throttling detected. Transferred 18TB in 5 days with no warnings or speed reduction. Overage tracking visible in real-time on the dashboard — transparent and predictable.
Contabo (New York): 195-198 Mbps sustained — consistent but ceiling-limited by the 200Mbps port. No throttling within the port speed. CPU performance showed 15-20% variance during US business hours, which can compound with the bandwidth limitation for latency-sensitive workloads.
InterServer (Secaucus): 880-920 Mbps sustained. Minor congestion dips to ~800 Mbps during US business hours (10am-4pm ET), recovering to full speed off-peak. Port speed is honest; the limitation is the 2TB cap, not the throughput.
Hostinger (US): 890-930 Mbps sustained. Similar minor business-hour congestion pattern as InterServer, dropping to ~820 Mbps at peak. NVMe disk I/O never bottlenecked the network — the storage layer could feed 1Gbps without breaking a sweat, confirming the 65K IOPS claim.
None of the five providers I tested enforced a hidden fair use cap during my 7-day test. That is not an accident — I specifically selected providers that either do not have fair use policies (BuyVM) or have clear, stated caps (the other four). The “unlimited with hidden throttle” providers did not make this list because they fail the most basic test of bandwidth honesty. For more on our testing approach, see our benchmark methodology.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does “unlimited bandwidth” actually mean in VPS hosting?
It means the provider will not send you an overage bill. That is all it means. Every “unlimited bandwidth” VPS has a fair use policy in the terms of service that allows the provider to throttle your port speed or suspend your account if you exceed an unpublished threshold — typically 5-15TB/month depending on the provider. The word “unlimited” describes billing, not capacity. If you need genuinely unrestricted transfer, look for “unmetered” providers like BuyVM (no cap, 1Gbps port, $3.50/mo) or high-cap providers like Hetzner (20TB stated cap, $4.59/mo) where you know the actual number.
What is the difference between bandwidth and transfer?
Bandwidth is a rate — how fast data can flow at any given moment, measured in Mbps or Gbps. Transfer is a volume — how much total data moves in a billing period, measured in TB/month. A 1Gbps port (bandwidth) can theoretically move 330TB/month (transfer) if fully saturated. VPS providers confuse these terms constantly. When a provider says “unlimited bandwidth,” they almost always mean “unlimited transfer” — which itself is not truly unlimited. The port speed (actual bandwidth) is always physically limited, typically to 200Mbps-1Gbps.
How do VPS fair use policies actually work?
Fair use policies give providers the contractual right to reduce your port speed or suspend service if your usage exceeds what they consider “normal.” The enforcement varies: some throttle your port from 1Gbps to 100Mbps with no warning, some send an email, some suspend the VPS until next billing cycle. The threshold is almost never published — it exists to protect the provider’s margins, not to give you a predictable service. I have seen fair use caps triggered anywhere from 3TB to 15TB depending on provider and network segment.
Is BuyVM’s unmetered bandwidth truly unlimited?
Yes. BuyVM provides a 1Gbps port with no transfer cap, no fair use policy, no throttling, and no overage charges. You can saturate it 24/7/365. The theoretical maximum at sustained full speed is approximately 330TB/month. I ran iperf3 continuously for 7 days and never saw a speed drop. The only limit is the port speed itself: 1Gbps. There is no asterisk, no “subject to reasonable use” clause. BuyVM built their network to absorb this, priced it at $3.50/mo, and does not flinch when you actually use it.
How much transfer does a typical website actually use per month?
Far less than you think. A WordPress site averaging 2MB per page load uses about 2TB/month at 1 million pageviews — which is already a high-traffic site. An ecommerce store with 100,000 monthly visitors typically transfers 500GB-1TB. A blog with 50,000 readers uses 100-200GB. Most websites never exceed 1TB/month. You only need genuinely high transfer for video streaming, file distribution, VPN/proxy servers, backup mirrors, or CDN origin servers.
Why does Contabo limit port speed to 200Mbps despite offering 32TB transfer?
Economics. Contabo can afford to offer 32TB of transfer because the 200Mbps port physically cannot move more than ~65TB/month even at sustained maximum throughput. The low port speed is the actual rate limiter — the 32TB cap is generous but largely theoretical for most workloads. A 10GB file takes 7 minutes at 200Mbps versus 80 seconds at 1Gbps. For sustained background traffic, the volume is excellent. For bursty, user-facing workloads, Hetzner’s 20TB at 1Gbps is the better choice despite the lower cap.
Which bandwidth pricing model is cheapest per TB?
BuyVM is effectively free per TB: unmetered at $3.50/mo with ~330TB theoretical capacity works out to ~$0.01/TB. Hetzner’s 20TB at $4.59/mo is $0.23/TB included, $1.19/TB overage. Contabo’s 32TB at $6.99/mo is $0.22/TB included, $1.30/TB overage. InterServer is the most expensive: 2TB at $6/mo is $3/TB included, with $10/TB overage. At 30TB/month usage, the annual cost ranges from $42 (BuyVM) to $3,432 (InterServer).
What is the best VPS for a VPN or proxy server?
BuyVM at $3.50/mo. VPN and proxy workloads are bandwidth-intensive but need minimal CPU and RAM. The unmetered 1Gbps port means you never hit a transfer cap, and there are no fair use restrictions. For caching proxies that need more RAM (Squid, Varnish), Hetzner at $4.59/mo with 4GB RAM and 20TB is the next best option. Avoid Contabo for VPN — the 200Mbps port speed directly bottlenecks VPN throughput for end users.
What happens if I exceed my VPS bandwidth cap?
It depends on the provider, and you should know this before signing up. Contabo charges $1.30/TB overage, clearly documented. Hetzner charges $1.19/TB, tracked in real-time on your dashboard. InterServer charges $10/TB — expensive and adds up fast. Hostinger may throttle or suspend service (their policy is less specific). BuyVM has no cap to exceed. The worst outcome is providers who advertise “unlimited” and then suspend your VPS mid-month for “abuse” when you use what they promised you. Always check the TOS, specifically the bandwidth and fair use sections, before committing to any provider. Use our price comparison tool to see the real costs side by side.
The Bottom Line on “Unlimited Bandwidth”
Stop searching for unlimited. Start searching for honest. BuyVM at $3.50/mo is the only provider where “unlimited” is actually what you get — an unmetered 1Gbps port with no cap and no fine print. For production workloads that need both bandwidth and infrastructure quality, Hetzner at $4.59/mo delivers 20TB at 1Gbps with the cheapest overage rate in the industry. For maximum volume at any speed, Contabo at $6.99/mo gives you 32TB with the caveat of a 200Mbps port. Pick the model that matches your workload. Ignore the adjective.