Confused about hosting offer: 20 M/bit uplink speed vs Gig/E Uplink Connectivity?

Question

The datacenter in question is offering the following for colocating a server:

20 M/bit uplink speed
Gig/E Uplink Connectivity

Could someone explain the difference in the above? I'm confused as to what the throughput speed is for users who will visit websites hosted on this server.

They're giving you a 1GbE physical connection which is capped at 20 Mbps of data transit. — joeqwerty, Aug 22 '17 at 15:32
@joeqwerty would that mean when website visitors download a file, the maximum speed would be 20mb/s or 2mb/s? — Winker, Aug 22 '17 at 15:34
Well, it would be 20Mbps. Why would you think that it would be 2Mbps? — joeqwerty, Aug 22 '17 at 15:35
@joeqwerty I guess I'm confusing the bits vs bytes here. At 20Mbps the ability for users to download would only be 2.5 megabytes/second right? — Winker, Aug 22 '17 at 15:36

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 22 '17 at 15:45

The first 20 M/bit uplink is 20 Megabits, around 2.5 Megabyte per second.

The second is Gigabit thoughput is in the order of 125 Megabyte per second.

Measured from your server to the open internet, not including any congestion.

Small hosting companies may only have 1G or smaller backbones, while the largest hosts (AWS, Azure, Rackspace) have multiple carrier grade backbone circuits in the order of 200G+ scale.

Confused about hosting offer: 20 M/bit uplink speed vs Gig/E Uplink Connectivity?

1 Answers1