Is 100 Mbps Internet Enough for a Server Rack?

In the world of data centers, servers, and hosting having a faster internet connection is necessary. You shouldn’t be miser here because you could bottleneck everything here. For most of us, 100 Mbps internet connection is fast, even it is enough to host multiple blogs, websites, or any other low network intensive web project.

I too run a self-hosted cloud backup service for myself from home and it is enough for me while for blogs and website I use bigger and faster servers.

The type of internet connection matters too, for server’s internet connectivity you must use only fiber optics connection, as it is damn fast with lowest latency.

But Gigabit internet is a commodity today, at least for web hosting companies.

If your hosting company does not offer you a Gigabit internet port then a 100 Mbps connection is still fast enough to handle the majority of workloads, but it is slow as today’s standards. 100 Mbps will not bottleneck easily but as soon as multiple users hit the server same time, it will divide the speed evenly among them.

Think, if the network is used by 10 users and each user starts to utilize 10 Mbps, then your server’s network will begin to struggle and any new users have to wait.

Unless the hosted files on server is going to get a massive hit, or going viral; then 100 Mbps is enough to handle any small-medium network load. But do note that, for large server racks even a Gigabit connection is considered slow, but it is minimum norms.

That is why, if the servers are going to be used by multiple users at the same time for blogs and basic work then 100 Mbps internet is average, and not slow.

It becomes slow when your projects turn into network intensive work like storage server where fast internet is a must, video streaming service where even Gigabit network sweats, or an eCommerce web servers where thousands of users keep visiting the website and looking to buy anything over there.

So for your small-medium servers setup, 100 Mbps could be fast, but not reliable for multiple users at the same time if everyone going to use internet. Get at least a 300 Mbps minimum or a Gigabit connection for the servers and aim for 99.99% uptime make sure you buy internet from two differently located ISPs and set fail-overs.