Choosing & sizing
How much bandwidth does a VPS need?
Short answer
Most projects use far less than they fear. A typical blog serving 50,000 monthly visits uses about 100 GB. A VPN carrying 1080p video for one person uses roughly 3 GB per hour. Video streaming and seedboxes are the exceptions, where terabytes are normal. Plans here include 2–50 TB, and one is unmetered.
Estimate from page weight rather than intuition: multiply average page size by page views. A 2 MB page served 50,000 times is 100 GB. Images and video dominate; text and code are noise by comparison.
Two things consume bandwidth in ways people underestimate: automated crawlers hitting your site, and backups leaving it. Both are worth measuring before choosing a plan.
| Workload | Typical monthly transfer |
|---|---|
| Blog, 50k visits | ~100 GB |
| Web application, 500k requests | ~300 GB |
| Personal VPN, heavy use | ~1–2 TB |
| Game server, 20 slots | ~1 TB |
| Jellyfin for a household | ~3–5 TB |
| Seedbox at ratio | 10–40 TB |
7 answers in Choosing & sizing
- What is a VPS? A VPS (virtual private server) is a virtual machine with guaranteed CPU, memory and storage, running its own operating system on shared physical hardw…
- What is a VPS used for? A VPS runs anything that needs to be online continuously: websites and APIs, game servers, VPN and proxy endpoints, mail servers, trading bots, CI run…
- How much does a VPS cost? A usable VPS starts at about $4 a month for 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of NVMe storage. A production instance with dedicated cores, 8 GB of RAM and…
- What is the cheapest VPS that is actually usable? About $4 a month buys 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of NVMe on real KVM virtualisation. That is genuinely enough for a WireGuard VPN, a DNS resolver, …
- How much RAM does a VPS need? Match RAM to the workload, not to a price tier. 1 GB runs a VPN, DNS resolver or small bot. 2–4 GB runs a small website with a database. 8 GB is the c…
- How many vCPUs does a VPS need? Most workloads need fewer cores than people buy. One shared core saturates a gigabit VPN link. Two dedicated cores run a busy website. Four run a game…