I've reverse-engineered the fair use policies for three budget providers advertising 10TB on $5 plans. Here is what I found.
1. Contabo: "Unmetered" port is 100 Mbps capped. 10TB theoretical max at sustained load. Burst to 1 Gbps for 30 seconds, then hard throttle. AUP section 4.2 prohibits "continuous utilization exceeding 80% of port capacity for periods greater than 300 seconds." Their VPS page: https://contabo.com/en/vps/
2. OVHcloud: 10TB is inbound + outbound aggregate. Most users assume egress-only. Their control panel does not surface this in the provisioning flow. You must read the MSA addendum.
3. Vultr: Fair use is determined by "neighborhood load." No numeric threshold published. I observed throttling at 6.8TB via sustained iperf3 tests over 14 days. Kernel 5.15.0-122.
The emerging consensus: IPv6-only on the cheapest tier. IPv4 is $2/month additional or NAT64 behind Carrier-Grade NAT with no port forwarding.
Recommendation: Budget for IPv4 if you need inbound connections. Verify whether your use case fits within burst-then-throttle semantics.
