'unlimited' bandwidth that throttles at 2GB

20 years in this business and I still see this dance. Kids these days buy "unlimited" plans from budget shops, then act surprised when the fine print bites.

I purchased a RackNerd VPS last month specifically to test their claims. Advertised: unlimited bandwidth. Reality: hard throttle at 2GB daily transfer, then 10Mbps cap. I crafted a ticket with three days of iperf3 data, tcpdump logs, and mtr reports. Polite, factual, documented.

They have not responded in 72 hours. Mark my words: this ends with a ToS reference to "fair use" that was added in 2019 and nobody read. Back when, unlimited meant something. These days it means "we hope you do not read."

The ticket said...

"Dear sir, your iperf3 test to our speedtest server is abuse of network resources per section 14.3. Please use our looking glass for bandwidth verification."

I once had a customer submit 400GB of nginx logs to prove "unlimited" was false. The provider terminated for "excessive ticket attachments." The logs were gzipped to 12MB. I am still impressed by that reach.

[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate         Retr
[  5]   0.00-1.00   sec   112 MBytes   941 Mbits/sec    0
[  5]   1.00-2.00   sec   113 MBytes   945 Mbits/sec    0
[  5]   2.00-3.00   sec  8.45 MBytes  70.8 Mbits/sec   12
[  5]   3.00-4.00   sec  0.00 Bytes  0.00 bits/sec    0

Decent disk IO, meh network. Wait, that's your throttle hitting at 2GB exactly. Clean cutoff.

Other RackNerd tests from my bench:
- CloudCone: 10GB soft, gradual degrade
- Hetzner: actual metered, no games — https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
- Leaseweb: "unlimited" with 1TB hidden