Question

Maximum bandwidth usage possible from a droplet

If the maximum bandwidth for a droplet is at 10Gbps then does that mean my bandwidth usage will never go above 3Tb per month for a given month?


Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
February 6, 2024

Hi there,

I think that the 3TB you mentioned seems to be a significant underestimation. In reality, actual bandwidth usage will vary greatly based on your application’s usage patterns, peak traffic times, and how consistently data is being transferred but let’s try to calculate this roughly.

Let’s break down the numbers:

  • Bandwidth capacity: 10 Gbps (gigabits per second)
  • Seconds in a minute: 60
  • Minutes in an hour: 60
  • Hours in a day: 24
  • Days in a month: Let’s use 30 days for simplicity.

Calculation:

  1. Convert Gbps to GBytes per second: 10 Gbps / 8 = 1.25 GBps (gigabytes per second).
  2. Calculate GB per month: 1.25 GBps * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 30 days.

With a 10 Gbps connection, theoretically, you could transfer up to approximately 3,240,000 GB (or 3.24 PB—petabytes) of data in a month, assuming you could sustain the maximum bandwidth capacity continuously 24/7 throughout the entire month.

However this amount of traffic would be unrealistically high for a single Droplet.

But things such as network overhead, the nature of the traffic, and limitations at the receiving end (for outbound traffic) or sending end (for inbound traffic) will also influence the total amount of data transferred in a month.

Best,

Bobby

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Become a contributor for community

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

DigitalOcean Documentation

Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.

Resources for startups and SMBs

The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.

Get our newsletter

Stay up to date by signing up for DigitalOcean’s Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

New accounts only. By submitting your email you agree to our Privacy Policy

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Get started for free

Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*

*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.