Wiki > Download Rate Limit

This article details the complex nature of the download speed limit in relation to the amount we advertise. It is meant to help people understand why we claim what we do with this figure.

First and foremost, when we claim an imposed download speed limit, that is not quite correct. At the time of this writing, all of our servers have download links that are 1000 Mbps, while we sell these as 100, 150 or 300 Mbps based on the plan you buy.

In order to make the most of the bandwidth available we maximize the speed you get when downloading. It's not uncommon for users to get up to 800 Mbps or more for a download speed. The problem is that even top-performing hard drives can't record data nearly as fast as you can download it. We mitigate this by augmenting your disk storage with a limited shared pool of RAM based storage which is downloaded to as a buffer, allowing you to exceed the disk write speed.

This means the program you're using to download data will download directly to RAM that will continually empty as fast as the disk can write. This frees up more RAM in the pool for more data to be stored there. This allows you to download up to a few GiB at a time significantly faster than technology would otherwise make possible.

There is however, a "brick wall" that can be run into, if the download is large enough that it completely exhausts the per-user limitation of the RAM buffering. This is often observed by a sudden drop in download speed to approximately the advertised speed, which will be maintained until the download is completed.

Because of this limitation, we chose to only sell what can be sustained under normal conditions rather than 1000 Mbps as many other hosts might try to sell you. What you buy is the speed you should be able to expect, anything more is a free bonus on top of it.