Getting data into a cloud is free; getting it out is billed by the gigabyte. AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Oracle and R2 list rates side by side, what 10 to 300 TB a month costs, the NAT and cross-zone charges the price page hides, and the two ways out: exit waivers and flat-rate ports.
Port speed, guaranteed rate and traffic allowance are three different numbers, and VPS plan pages love to blur them. What a guaranteed gigabit moves in a month, why bandwidth costs CPU as well, how to test a plan with iperf3, and where a VPS stops and a dedicated server starts.
Unmetered says the bytes are not counted; it does not say the port is yours at the busy hour. The five contract clauses to check, how to size a tier from your peak, what each tier costs per delivered terabyte, and the 13 cities where the server can live at the same price.
Nobody quotes you a price per terabyte; you derive it, and it comes out differently under each of the three ways bandwidth is sold. Flat unmetered, 95th percentile and per-gigabyte egress, with the conversion table and the break-even formula that decides between them.
A VOD box is two machines pretending to be one: a large cold catalog and a small hot working set. Price them separately. From 2.7 GB per 1080p hour through 96 TB raw becoming 52 TiB usable, to why range requests are the argument for an NVMe tier.
A streaming server does three jobs with three different bottlenecks. Ingest wants path quality, transcode wants cores, egress wants a port. Size them separately, work a real build end to end, and see why the blended ABR bitrate — not the top rung — sets the uplink.
Monthly transfer is the wrong starting point, because a port is a rate. Size from peak concurrency, per-unit bitrate and headroom — then check the cost per gigabit of each tier, because that curve is not monotonic and the cheapest gigabit is not where most people buy.
Your provider polls the port every five minutes, sorts the samples, throws away the top five percent and bills the rest. That is 36 free hours a month. Here is how to compute your own billed rate before the invoice arrives, and when a flat unmetered price beats it.
The edges take the load until a purge, a deploy or a cold region sends every one of them to the origin at once. Hit-ratio arithmetic, the cache headers that are the whole contract, and which machine to actually build.
The port sets the ceiling; disk, TLS and connection state decide the number you actually reach. Bitrate arithmetic for every tier, a worked 10 Gbps live example, and the three resources that run out before the network card does.
Port tiers are sold in Gbps, but workloads arrive in viewers, backup windows and downloads per hour. The arithmetic that turns one into the other, with no rounding in our favour.
Unmetered is not unlimited-with-an-asterisk. It means you pay for the port speed and never for the bytes that cross it — here is what that changes in practice.