Maximise Efficiency with Bandwidth Pooling for Your Bare Metal Servers

If so, you're not the only one. It's a common frustration among infrastructure teams, IT managers, and resellers managing multiple workloads across several servers. Most traditional hosting providers charge for bandwidth per server, which makes it hard to optimize costs — especially when usage fluctuates unpredictably.

That’s why at NovoServe, we’ve introduced bandwidth pooling: a smarter, more flexible model that lets you combine the bandwidth of multiple servers into a single shared pool. Whether you’re running a high-traffic app, reselling infrastructure, or simply looking for more efficient billing, bandwidth pooling gives you the flexibility to adapt — without overpaying.

SPEAK TO EXPERT

What Is Bandwidth Pooling?

A bandwidth pool is a shared allocation of bandwidth across multiple servers. Instead of assigning and billing traffic per server individually, you can now group several servers together and treat their combined bandwidth as one collective resource.

Let’s say you have four servers, each with 25TB of outbound traffic included. Normally, if one server exceeds 25TB, you pay overage fees — even if the others are well below their limits. But with bandwidth pooling, those four servers share a 100TB pool. As long as your total usage stays within that combined threshold, there are no overage charges.

This model is particularly useful in real-world environments where not all servers generate the same amount of traffic. Some may handle intensive workloads like video streaming, while others are used for lower-bandwidth tasks like database management or backup storage. Pooling gives your high-traffic servers more flexibility while reducing waste from underutilized resources.

Why Bandwidth Pooling Makes Sense

Whether you're managing a small fleet or operating a full-scale hosting business, bandwidth pooling can unlock immediate advantages. Here’s why it’s worth considering:

Cost Optimization

The most obvious benefit: you save money. With pooled bandwidth, you no longer need to worry about manually allocating bandwidth per server or paying overage fees when one server exceeds its cap. Instead, you pay only when the total traffic from your pooled servers surpasses the shared limit.

Improved Resource Efficiency

Bandwidth pooling enables more intelligent use of your infrastructure. Rather than leaving bandwidth idle on underused servers, you allow your entire system to self-balance based on actual demand. It’s like having a flexible budget that automatically adjusts to your needs.

95th Percentile Billing Support

NovoServe’s bandwidth pool also supports 95th percentile billing, also known as burstable billing. This is a popular model in the enterprise world, where billing is based on your usage minus the top 5% of traffic spikes. This means you’re not penalized for short bursts in activity — and your billing is based on sustained usage instead of random traffic peaks.

In markets like telecom, CDN, and cloud services, 95th percentile billing is already the standard. With bandwidth pooling, you can now adopt this billing model easily, aligning your infrastructure spending with industry best practices.

Better Margins for Resellers

If you're a reseller or managed service provider, bandwidth pooling can dramatically improve your margins. Your clients likely have varied usage patterns — some use more, some use less. Instead of tracking usage per client per server, you can group them all into a shared pool and bill them based on actual usage. This simplifies accounting, improves predictability, and gives you more room to grow.

Use Cases for Bandwidth Pooling

To make the benefits clearer, here are a few real-world scenarios where bandwidth pooling shines:

🎮 Game server providers: Some games generate heavy upstream/downstream traffic, others are idle for hours. Bandwidth pooling ensures busy servers can scale without incurring penalties.
📦 CDN or proxy hosting: These workloads typically spike at certain times (e.g., software release days or during DDoS protection). Pooling lets you handle the spikes more smoothly.
🧠 AI/ML workloads: Large AI models often push or pull data in bulk. Bandwidth pooling helps maintain smooth traffic distribution across training and inference nodes.
📡 VPN providers: Clients across different regions may use very different amounts of bandwidth. With pooled billing, you don’t need to micromanage traffic assignments per server.

Built on a Rock-Solid Network

Bandwidth pooling is powerful — but it only works well if it runs on top of a fast, reliable network. That’s where NovoServe’s infrastructure really makes a difference.

Here’s what powers our network behind the scenes:

✅ 25TB egress included per server, and ingress traffic is always free
🧠 Dual uplinks and dual power feeds per server, for full redundancy
🔗 Every top-of-rack switch is connected to the network core with up to 800Gbps capacity
🌐 Multi-core switch architecture for maintenance with zero downtime
📶 16+ Tbps total uplink capacity, giving you room to grow and scale
🏆 Largest AMS-IX connection on record, with 1.6 Tbps capacity
🌍 Connectivity through multiple Points of Presence across Europe and the US — if one POP fails, traffic is rerouted automatically

Want to explore our full network design and partners? Check out our network infrastructure.

Or see how it performs in real-time from your location with our speedtest tool.

SPEEDTEST

How to Get Started With Bandwidth Pooling

We’ve made it easy for our customers to get started with bandwidth pooling. There’s no complicated interface or manual configuration required.

💬 Just reach out to our team via live chat, WhatsApp, or send us a message through our website. We’ll walk you through the process, help identify which servers to include in your pool, and configure the setup for you — including optional 95th percentile billing if needed.

Whether you're hosting just a few servers or dozens across different locations, we’ll help you design the most efficient pooling strategy based on your actual usage.

Bandwidth pooling is more than just a technical feature — it’s a smarter way to think about how your infrastructure consumes and pays for resources. With more predictable billing, reduced overage costs, and better flexibility across workloads, it’s a solution that empowers both IT teams and business leaders to scale with confidence.

And when it's backed by a global network as strong and redundant as NovoServe’s, you're not just saving money — you're building on a foundation you can trust.