The awkward question every VPS provider dodges: throttling, plainly explained

If you've ever seen "Unlimited 1 Gbps" on a hosting landing page — ours included — the marketing claim and the live network behaviour are not exactly the same thing. Every provider on the planet throttles sustained heavy traffic on entry-tier plans. Some call it throttling, some call it "fair use", most don't mention it at all until a ticket arrives. This article explains, plainly: why throttling exists, when our shaper kicks in, and how to tell whether throttling is what is slowing you down — or something else entirely.

The math: why a €2.98 plan cannot include sustained 1 Gbps

A real dedicated 1 Gbps port from a tier-1 carrier costs €500–1 500 per month — sometimes far more (the actual market table is in our internet speed explainer). At €2.98 a month, the only honest economic model is: hundreds of customers share one physical 1 Gbps uplink. That works because the vast majority of real traffic is bursty — a website spike, a Telegram bot burst, a 5-minute download — and 99% of the time the pipe is mostly idle.

Throttling is the mechanism that keeps that shared model honest. It lets bursts run at full port speed, and caps anyone who tries to permanently saturate the link. Without it, one customer with a public file mirror at 800 Mbps for 24 hours straight would degrade every other VPS on the same node into uselessness. Every serious provider — ours, Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean, Vultr — applies some form of cap on sustained heavy traffic. The differences are in the wording and the threshold, not the existence.

How our shaper actually behaves

• Short bursts (downloading a Linux ISO, transferring a few GB of data, a website traffic spike): full port speed, no throttle.
• Sustained heavy load (continuous tens of Mbps for hours, public file mirrors at 100+ Mbps, torrent seedboxes pushing terabytes per day, CDN nodes, traffic-exchange / proxy resale): the cap kicks in.
• The cap is not a hard kill. Your VPS keeps running, web traffic keeps serving, SSH still works. You just can't permanently saturate the shared uplink at the expense of everyone else.
• Spike-style tests show full speed first. The first burst after a quiet period runs at line rate (this is how speedtest gets its initial number). Sustained tests fall into the throttled bucket after a few seconds.

When throttling is NOT what you're seeing

Several other things look like throttling but aren't — confusing them wastes everyone's time. None of these are our shaper:

• Speed test from your laptop over a VPN to a server in another country shows a low number → 95% chance it is the public internet, not our network (speed explainer for the math).
• Speed dips while you have other network load running on the VPS → you're measuring what's left, not the total bandwidth. Stop the other traffic and re-test.
• A single-flow TCP across continents caps at low Mbps → that is physics (the Mathis formula), not the shaper.
• The drop happens at the same time as a transit-provider outage somewhere on your path → upstream incident, not us.
• Your VPS just rebooted or its network stack is fresh → cold-start, give the OS 30 seconds to settle before measuring.

What to do if you actually need sustained gigabits

Some workloads legitimately need sustained high bandwidth: a video streaming origin, a real-time analytics pipeline, a CDN backhaul, a public file mirror. These don't fit the €2.98 shared model and never have, at any provider. Talk to us — we can quote a plan with a guaranteed sustained rate, or a real dedicated bandwidth contract from a tier-1 carrier. It costs what it costs (the market price is in the table inside the internet speed article), but it does exist.