Help Centre / Plans, Limits And Billing

Bandwidth Explained

Updated 2 October 2026

Bandwidth is everything your websites send out to the internet in a month. Pages, images, downloads, the lot. Every plan includes an allowance, and this page explains exactly how it is counted so there are no surprises.

What Counts

Three things add up to the number you see on your usage page:

• Pages and files your websites serve to visitors. This is almost all of it for a normal site.
• Anything your site sends out by itself, such as a plugin calling an external service or a large file pushed to another server.
• Files you download over SFTP, including any copy of the site you take to keep yourself.

What Does Not Count

• Anything Cloudflare serves from its own cache. A large share of your images, stylesheets and scripts are delivered from Cloudflare’s network close to the visitor and never touch our servers, so they never reach your allowance. In practice this is why real usage is usually far below what a raw traffic estimate suggests.
• The nightly backups we take, which leave from the host rather than from your website.
• Email sent through the included sending. It leaves from the host, not from your site. Mail sent through your own SMTP provider leaves from your site and does count.
• Traffic between your site, the database and the cache, which stays inside our network and never leaves it.

The Allowance Belongs To The Account

Bandwidth is pooled. On a plan with three websites, all three draw from the same monthly figure, so a quiet brochure site leaves more room for a busy shop. You do not have to balance anything.

If you want to stop one website from taking more than its share, you can set a cap on it. See set a usage cap on a website. A cap is a ceiling inside the shared pool, never an allowance of its own.

When It Resets

The month runs from your own billing day, not from the first of the calendar month. If you signed up on the 12th, your usage resets on the 12th. A billing day later than the 28th is moved to the 28th, so the period exists in every month. That way the allowance and the bill cover the same days.

Where To See It

Open a website and go to its Usage tab for that site’s figure in the current period. The Usage page at account level shows the account total and a breakdown per website. The figures update every few minutes rather than instantly. Traffic to a staging copy counts too.

What Happens If You Run Out

You get warned well before anything happens. The platform raises a notice as your account approaches the limit, so there is time to act.

Suspension is not a punishment and nothing is deleted. Your files, databases and backups are untouched and the site returns exactly as it was. If you are close to the line, the fix is usually to move up a plan rather than to wait, because the allowance applies from the start of your next period either way.

Why A Site Uses More Than Expected

A few causes come up repeatedly:

• Large unoptimised images. A page carrying several multi-megabyte photographs multiplies every visit. Resizing them is usually the single biggest win.
• Video served from your own site. Video is enormous. Put it on YouTube or Vimeo and embed it.
• A bot or scraper hammering the site. Worth checking if the number jumps without a matching rise in real visitors.
• A compromised site sending data out. Every website here has a ceiling on how fast it can send data, which limits the damage, and the nightly malware scan is there to catch the cause.

If the figure looks wrong rather than merely high, open a ticket and we will look at where it came from.