← Glossary
Bandwidth
Total data transferred from the host to visitors per month. The metric most often advertised but rarely the binding constraint.
Bandwidth on free tiers is measured as bytes leaving the host (egress). 100 GB per month is the typical cap on Vercel, Netlify, and Render. Cloudflare Pages gives unlimited bandwidth , the only major host that does. Surge.sh has a "fair use" policy with no documented number.
What 100 GB actually buys: roughly 100,000 page views of a 1 MB page, or 1 million page views of a 100 KB page. Most indie projects do not hit this ceiling. Bandwidth limits become real when you serve images, video, or downloadable files at scale.
The metric to watch when you do serve media: per-request size, not just total bandwidth. A single 5 MB hero image served 20,000 times = 100 GB. Optimize images aggressively (WebP, responsive sizes) and bandwidth rarely bites.
When bandwidth is your binding constraint, Cloudflare Pages and R2 (object storage) are the indie answer. Pages serves the HTML free; R2 serves files at $0.015/GB egress, no minimum. Vercel and Netlify charge $40 per extra 100 GB after the cap.