Size your speed tier
Speed tiers are sold by throughput, not by traffic, so the question is not “how many gigabytes will I move” but “how much of that do I need to move at once”. Measure a real batch before you pick.
This page lives here rather than on the product page on purpose: it is a lab procedure, and a lab procedure between the price table and the setup steps costs you the decision it was meant to help with.
Run a representative batch
Section titled “Run a representative batch”Use the actual destinations, route, protocol, session mode, and client you plan to run in production. A small sample against easy targets cannot size a workload with different destinations, locations, or session behaviour.
Record, for both successful and failed attempts:
| Measure | What to record | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Batch shape | Planned request count, exact target set, requested route, protocol, session mode, test window, total elapsed time | A sample that differs from production in destination or session behaviour does not size production |
| Response size | Transferred request and response bytes per attempt, split by successful, challenged, and failed | Per-GB cost follows transferred bytes; a fixed tier has to carry the measured traffic inside the window |
| Success and retry rate | Successful responses, target rejections, timeouts, other failures, total attempts, retries under a declared policy | Retries consume both time and transfer — compare cost per useful result, not per initial request |
| Concurrency | Peak simultaneous requests, and how long that peak is sustained | The speed tier is a ceiling on the peak, not on the average |
| Schedule | Whether traffic is continuous, bursty, or scheduled, and the hours it must complete in | A burst that must finish in one hour needs a bigger tier than the same bytes spread over a day |
Convert the measurement into a tier
Section titled “Convert the measurement into a tier”- Take the transferred bytes for one full representative cycle, including retries.
- Divide by the seconds the cycle is allowed to take. That is your required average throughput.
- Multiply by your peak-to-average ratio — the peak is what the tier has to absorb.
- Convert to megabits per second: bytes per second × 8 ÷ 1,000,000.
- Choose the next tier up. Tiers are a ceiling; sizing to the exact number leaves nothing for variance.
- Re-measure after a week of production traffic and adjust.
Effective throughput still depends on destination behaviour, concurrency limits, and retries. The tier bounds what the network will carry for you; it does not promise what a destination will serve.
Where per-GB stops being cheaper
Section titled “Where per-GB stops being cheaper”At the $1.64/GB entry rate, unlimited becomes cheaper somewhere past roughly 350 GB a month — the cheapest monthly unlimited tier is 100 Mbps at $574.18. On the volume rates (about $0.84/GB at 500 GB) the crossover moves out to roughly 680 GB.
Both numbers assume the traffic fits inside the tier you would buy. If the same bytes have to move in a two-hour window rather than across the month, the tier — not the total — decides the price.