A common misconception is that the server’s uplink, in our case 1000Mbit / 1Gbit is also the download or upload speed on the server. This is the case as Mbit and MB (MegaByte) are two different things.
A Megabit is 1/8 as big as a MegaByte, meaning that to download a 1MB (1MegaByte) file in 1 second you would need a connection of 8Mbit. The difference between a GigaByte (GB) and a Gigabit (Gb) is the same, with a GigaByte being 8 times larger than a Gigabit.
Factors that can affect the download speed are
- Hard disk read/write speed
- Processor limitations/throttling on VPS
- Share ratio of the switch’s uplink
An uplink is always limited by the hard disk’s maximum write speed, i.e a hard disk can write with a maximum of 50MB per second the maximum download speed will also be 50MB per second. Thankfully most modern SATA3 disks have a writing speed that is much greater than this and with SSD storage this limit has become obsolete.
Limiting a server’s processor capacity also has a negative affect on the download/upload speed as the processor simply does not have enough resources to process a large amount of incoming or outgoing data. This effect can be seen on our entry VPS packages where in most cases you will be able reach download/upload speed of around 60-65MB/S which correspondents to 480-520Mbit, which is nonetheless an impressive speed.
This limit does not apply to our Dedicated Servers as their processor(s) are not being throttled.
Our server’s are generally connected to one of our switches through a 1Gbit connection, our switches are generally connected to the router through a 2Gbit connection. If a switch’s uplink has a total throughput of 1.5Gbit you will only be able to reach a maximum of 500Mbit.