maximum input/output network bandwidth

There are no inbound limits by default, but default throttle for a Linode outbound is 50Mbps. It can be increased by support request. In my case that included showing I could saturate the default, which may be general policy, or it may be because the history on the nodes I was requesting had been low I/O rates.

I've increased some of my nodes to 100Mbps, and saw a reference elsewhere in the forums where someone went higher. I don't know what the policy on any maximum value is, though the internal network fabric is at least gigabit. A quick test of retrieving the Linode speedtest file from a node in the same data center got me around 300-400Mbps (and in the past I've even clocked 450+Mbps) so I guess at least that should be possible, though justifying may be trickier, unless you already have history of saturating earlier limits.

Of course, at those rates, you're going to eat through the monthly bandwidth allotment of most plans pretty quickly unless it's only very short lived spikes.

– David

It's a safety valve. A linode 512 only has 200GB of bandwidth, at full blast you could burn through that in 27 minutes.

The default outbound is 50. When I was migrating from an old linode to a new one, I opened a ticket and they bumped it up to 150 for me. When I was done, I had them set it back to 50. Better safe than sorry! I don't need any higher than 50, and if I did, Linode could increase it.

Incidentally, is the 50 megabit cap default on all plans? I recently fired up a Linode 2048, and I've been seeing almost 300 Mb/sec inbound (from a server in a nearby Softlayer datacenter). This is without ever opening a ticket for it.

The limit is only on outbound.