Short answer: your plan gives you a real, proportional slice of shared hardware — your plan's full speed when the disk is quiet, a fair guaranteed share when it is busy, and a steady sustained ceiling sized to what the plan costs. If you need more sustained speed than your plan includes, the way to get it is a higher-grade plan built for it. This article explains why, in plain terms.
What your plan actually buys
Pulsed Media runs its own hardware in its own datacenter in Finland — spinning-disk arrays, SSD-backed tiers, and high-capacity network uplinks. Real hardware costs real money, so every plan is priced as a proportional slice of it. A low-cost or promotional plan is a genuine, small slice; a higher-grade plan is a bigger one. That is the honest trade, and it is why the cheapest plans are also the slowest for sustained work — on purpose, not by accident.
Nobody can hand out unlimited sustained speed for a few euros, and we would rather tell you exactly where the line is than pretend it is not there.
Shared hardware, shared fairly
On a shared seedbox or storage box, several accounts live on the same physical disks. We size each account a proportional share so that no single account can swallow the whole array and slow everyone else to a crawl. Think of a shared road: when it is empty you drive at full speed, but the lane you paid for decides how much of the road is guaranteed yours once it fills up. That fairness is the point — it is what keeps your service predictable when the disk gets busy.
Two different dials (this is where most confusion comes from)
There are two separate controls on how fast your disk moves, and they are easy to mix up:
- Priority — decides your share of the disk when several accounts are hitting it at the same moment. When the disk is quiet, priority steps out of the way entirely and never throttles you; when it is busy, your plan's priority keeps you from being shoved to the back of the line. This is what our Seedbox and Storage Box Disk Priority guide describes, and it is true as written.
- Sustained ceiling — the upper bound on how much you can pull continuously, sized to your plan. Unlike priority, it is always present — busy disk or idle. Even on a completely quiet disk you will not go faster than your plan's ceiling, and the lowest-cost plans get the smallest one. That is a large part of what makes them the lowest-cost plans.
Both dials are real at the same time, and mixing them up is where "the priority guide says no cap when the disk is free, but I still hit a limit" comes from. The priority guide is right: priority itself does not cap you on an idle disk. What it does not spell out is the second dial — the sustained ceiling — which is what you are actually hitting. Priority governs your share of the disk under load; the sustained ceiling is the steady speed your plan tops out at, quiet disk or not.
Network speed is a separate question
Everything above is about disk throughput. Your network speed — the shared uplink, and what happens after a traffic quota — works differently and is covered in Is the upload rate capped?. If your speed question is really about bandwidth rather than disk, start there.
How to get more sustained speed
If sustained transfer speed is your real bottleneck — large continuous pulls, heavy day-in day-out throughput — the answer is a higher-grade plan:
- Higher shared tiers raise both your priority share and your sustained ceiling.
- SSD-backed plans are built specifically for sustained, high-throughput work; spinning-disk promotional tiers are not, and no amount of tuning changes that.
Which plan fits depends on what you actually do. Our Seedbox and Storage Box Resource Tiers guide lists the numbers behind every plan so you can compare before you buy. If you open a ticket describing your workload — big continuous transfers, lots of small files, streaming, backups — we will point you to the right fit. No pressure, and no upsell you do not need.
The bottom line
Your plan gives you exactly the slice it is priced for: your plan's full speed on a quiet disk, a fair guaranteed share when it is busy, and a steady sustained ceiling sized to what you pay. If that meets your needs, keep it — it stays exactly as it is. If you need more sustained throughput, a higher-grade or SSD-backed plan is the honest way to get it, and we are glad to help you choose.
