They have a soft limit of 2TB traffic/month, so you're probably not gonna get very far on that platform.
I run a very high traffic site on a hobby budget and my experience is that you're probably not gonna get around shopping for dedicated servers. That is if you want 500TB - 1PB of traffic per month to be in any way affordable. Forget AWS, Heroku and all that stuff. They're roughly twenty times (literally) more expensive.
Most are still way more expensive than dedicated server traffic and "fixed price" CDNs like Cloudflare are going to give you the boot if you serve >100TB on their 20 bucks plan and/or a lot of larger files.
This is what they write about their "unlimited traffic":
> Traffic usage is unlimited and free of charge. Please note that our unlimited traffic policy does not apply to servers that have the 10G uplink addon.
If I got a 1Gbps Hetzner server would I be able to serve 1Gbps to the US?
That said, architecting your application so that all the small, latency-sensitive data was served from a CDN and all the bulk data was served from Hetzner would be a good/affordable option.
They're still a good deal at that price point though.
A server provider that delivered on exactly what they're selling has been online.net, though they ramped up their prices recently. When they sell you X Mbit/s amount of "premium" bandwidth, you're always going to get at least that. If you exceed it a lot they'll cap you to exactly that though. I used to have 8 dedicated servers with them at ~30 Euro/month (excl. taxes) each for a total of ~3Gbit/s bandwidth.
I've had some complaints about download speeds by users from NA when using German-based providers and significantly less complaints when using servers in France (i.e. online.net) or elsewhere west of Germany. I cap download speeds at 3MB/s per user anyways though.
Though beggars can't be choosers. I buy any cheap bandwidth offers I see.
Another thing to look out for if you're planning to saturate 1Ggbit/s is using SSDs and/or a good amount (>=32GB) of RAM. You'll probably not manage to do that if you have 1TB worth of files on a HDD and 8GB RAM for your OS's page cache. If you're planning to use SSL to serve stuff make sure your CPU isn't super old or an Intel Atom or something (I tried having a fleet of a lot of mini dedis once...).
I should write a blog post about all this and more at some point. Maybe next year?
> I should write a blog post about all this and more at some point. Maybe next year?
Please do. I'd be interested to read more about your experiences.
Europe is always going to be better by some margin.
And, as I said, I've had some complaints with German-based providers (like Hetzner) from users in NA. Not enough to be a serious consideration though when weighted against cost.