How Much Is 30 TB of VPS Traffic? Mbps and Hours Explained
10gpsvps ·
30 TB in a 30-day month averages 92.59 Mbit/s. At a full 10 Gbps, the same 30 TB would last 6 h 40 min. Both figures are true, because port speed is a rate and an allowance is a volume.
The allowance is 30 TB a month on every plan in every location. Traffic here means outbound traffic, the data your server sends.
The math
30 TB = 240,000,000,000,000 bits
30 days = 2,592,000 seconds
Average over 30 days:
240,000,000,000,000 / 2,592,000
= 92.59 Mbit/s
Time at 10 Gbps:
240,000,000,000,000 / 10,000,000,000
= 24,000 secondsThese are the figures for each allowance:
| Allowance | Average over 30 days | Share of 10 Gbps | Lasts at 10 Gbps |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 TB Every plan | 92.59 Mbit/s | 0.93% | 6 h 40 min |
| 50 TB With 20 TB of extra traffic | 154.32 Mbit/s | 1.54% | 11 h 6 min 40 s |
A 31-day month lowers the average a little: 89.61 Mbit/s for 30 TB.
These numbers assume 1 TB is 1012 bytes and leave out protocol overhead, so a real transfer would take a little longer. A meter that counted binary terabytes (TiB) would give different figures: 30 TiB is an average of 101.81 Mbit/s over 30 days and lasts 7 h 19 min 48 s at 10 Gbps.
A rule you can use
1 Mbit/s held for a 30-day month is 324 GB. So multiply your average outbound rate in Mbit/s by 0.324 to get terabytes a month. A server that averages 50 Mbit/s sends about 16 TB. Leaseweb's knowledge base has the same kind of figure: a 100 Mbps port can transfer up to about 33 TB a month.
Use the average over the whole month and not your busy-hour peak. Many sites are quieter at night, so a peak of 300 Mbit/s can sit inside a much lower monthly average.
What that much traffic looks like
These are round examples we picked, not measurements. Your own page and file sizes will differ.
| Example | 30 TB | 50 TB |
|---|---|---|
| Page views at 2 MB each | 15 million | 25 million |
| Downloads of a 1 GB file | 30,000 | 50,000 |
| Hours of video at 5 Mbit/s | 13,333 | 22,222 |
Bursts add up
A high port speed makes large transfers short, and that can hide how much they add up to. Say a server pushes a 200 GB backup to another machine every night. At 10 Gbps that could finish in under 3 minutes, so it barely shows on a graph. Over 30 nights it is 6 TB of outbound traffic. That is 20% of 30 TB.
Direction matters as well. Pages, downloads and backups sent from your server are outbound. Sites that mostly serve visitors send far more than they receive. The port guide covers the rate side of this in more detail.
Keep your own count
On Ubuntu or Debian, vnStat records what passes through your network interface. Install it and give it some time to collect data:
sudo apt install vnstat
vnstat -mThe tx column is what your server sent. Treat the result as your own estimate, because it counts at your interface and is not the provider's meter. Plan so that a normal month stays inside the allowance with room to spare.
If 30 TB is not enough
You can buy extra traffic from your server's page, in packs of 5, 10, 20, 50 TB. A pack adds to the current calendar month and ends when the month ends. Unused extra traffic does not carry over.
To keep a busy month from running past your plan, set a traffic limit on the same page. Your server stops when it reaches the limit. Prices for every location are on the plans page.
