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You should remember that bandwidth is sold wholesale using bit/s in chunks of (eg.) 5Mbit; limiting users by some arbitrary number of bytes is an invention of hosting companies.

Thus for "serious" levels of traffic, you should look at the actual bandwidth (as in, bit/s) you would be connected to, not the byte cap. I'm not saying they are trying to deceive you, but just that it would explain your surprise.

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In other words, just because you might get 10000000000gigs of "free" inbound, doesn't mean you can actually get that much inbound out of the pipe.

Typically your inbound rate is capped by the ability of your software to process the incoming data.

For the most part that's roughly comparable to how hard it would be to generate that much data, parsing and datamining are probably a little bit more cpu intensive than generating data. So if typically you find that you can push 300 Mbit out of a box you can expect to get around that much inbound or a bit less, depending on your application.

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