How-tos and reference material for running servers on an unmetered network — configuration, capacity, transfers and the questions our engineers answer most often.
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.
Copying data is solved; sequencing is what fails. Lower the TTL two days out, sync in two passes so the window moves only a delta, replicate rather than copy databases, and rehearse the whole cutover once a week early. Plus the six things that always break.
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 BGP session is the easy step. What decides whether your route reaches anyone is the LOA, the IRR objects, and a ROA whose max length is not quietly authorising somebody else to originate your more-specifics.
A broken AAAA record does not take a site down, it makes it slower for everyone who has IPv6. The prefix you get, the static configuration to prefer, the three things that break it, and how to prove it works.
A stock kernel moves a few gigabits and then flattens. The bandwidth-delay arithmetic behind it, the sysctl ceilings to raise, the NIC queue work that follows, and the nginx settings that stop copying bytes.
Eight 12 TB drives give you 96 TB raw and four sensible ways to arrange them. What each level costs in capacity, what it buys in redundancy, and how long a rebuild really takes.
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.
Every dedicated machine ships with out-of-band access, so a reinstall is yours to run at 3 a.m. without a ticket. The order of operations, and the three places it usually goes wrong.
The first fifteen minutes after handover: a real user account, key-only SSH, a firewall that defaults to closed, and updates that install themselves.
Measure what your server is actually delivering, and raise the kernel defaults that cap a multi-gigabit link before you blame the network.