Posted: 2026-04-25
It's customary for most servers to not nearly hit their transfer allotment. I'm not quite sure if Vultr or DigitalOcean could sustain current pricing if everyone used the amount stated.
I started to realize that the figures I'm posting may be a bit optimistic, if everyone actually used their transfer allotment, I would need to make some serious adjustments.
The Slow Servers one-third cabinet has a 100Mbit/sec connection for now, which I'm expecting I'll have to upgrade. I'm accounting for 10 hosts at capacity, with 25GB/VM memory per host. With a gigabit connection, when we get there, 100Mbit/sec per host would be realistic, which would be about 30TB/month per host. So the current figures, with a gigabit connection, are realistic in that regard. (Gigabit is a bit over 300TB a month, maxed out.)
However, Freya's throughput is likely less than gigabit and I'm not sure I want to upgrade routers any time soon. Especially for this 1/3 cabinet. It's possible to hit gigabit with Freya and Thor at the same time, though I wouldn't want to have one go down and have average bandwidth higher than one alone could handle.
This is further complicated by IPv4 traffic likely ending up through a VPN or tunneling protocol, which also limits bandwidth. The figure could be different for IPv4 traffic than IPv6 traffic.
Anyway, I cut the stated figures by 10x, so 1TB down to 100GB for a 1GB memory server. I'm not going to limit existing customers below where they signed up at, but I want to set the expectation moving forward that Slow Servers is not currently setup to handle high bandwidth figures. I doubt any VPS is going to see anywhere near gigabit speeds anytime soon. If figures around or under 100Mbit/sec don't scare you, then Slow Servers may be for you! I care more about reliability and consistency than all out speed. Though I'm not going to promise that either reliability or consistency is higher than other providers at this point. Still a work in progress, though I think it's been running reasonably well.
With that being said, if your 1GB server with 100GB of transfer is using 1TB of traffic and everything is smooth, it doesn't matter. But consider if 100GB is the max you could use or if it's the minimum. If things get contentious and one user is exhausting bandwidth and way beyond the quota, then I'll take action. And you can always email me if you think your usage will be higher!
It's quite possible that I could grow into the 1/3 cabinet with all 10 hosts on a gigabit connection, stating the same transfer figures, and that no one would notice. I don't like the idea of the transfer figures being impossible to meet if everyone actually used them, though.
I mentioned Vultr and DigitalOcean, and most users not approaching those bandwidth figures. I wanted to put that into context from SporeStack.
For Vultr, last month SporeStack used 8.5% of the bandwidth allotment. This month is hovering around 10%.
For DigitalOcean, this month is roughly 9.5% of the allotment.
Lastly, IPv4 pricing has been set to $1.50/month. And you can now order with IPv4 through SporeStack.
Thank you for reading!