Website Hosting Cost by Traffic: Bandwidth, Overage and Yearly Cost
Estimate your monthly and yearly hosting bill from page views, average page weight, the bandwidth your plan includes and its overage price. Adds bot traffic, CDN offload and traffic growth, shows the page views you can serve before overage, cost per 1,000 views and a comparison with per-GB CDN pricing.
How it works
Bandwidth (GB) = page views × page weight (MB) × (1 + bot %) × (1 − CDN %) ÷ 1,024 · Overage = max(0, GB − included GB) × price per GB · Monthly cost = base price + overage · Break-even views = included GB × 1,024 ÷ effective MB per view · Average Mbps = GB × 1,024 × 8 ÷ seconds in a month
Bandwidth-based hosting bills scale with the total data you send, which is your traffic multiplied by how heavy each page is. Multiply monthly page views by the average page weight in megabytes and divide by 1,024 to get gigabytes. Most shared, VPS and platform plans bundle an allowance into a flat base price and charge per extra gigabyte only above it, so the base covers you until traffic or page weight pushes you over. Two things move the real number. Bots and crawlers (search engines, AI scrapers, uptime checks) also download pages, often adding 20–50% on content sites. A CDN or browser cache works the other way: bytes served from the edge or from a returning visitor’s cache never touch your origin host. Set both under More options, along with monthly growth to see a 12-month projection. The calculator also shows how many page views your allowance covers, your cost per 1,000 views, the average throughput in Mbps (size your connection for peaks several times higher) and what the same data would cost on Amazon CloudFront’s US pay-as-you-go rates (first 1 TB a month free, then $0.085/GB for the next 9 TB, as of October 2026). Many CDNs and platforms now also offer flat-rate plans with no per-GB overage, so compare plan terms as well as per-GB prices. The quickest lever is usually page weight: halving it halves your bandwidth.
Worked example
200,000 page views at 2 MB each is 400,000 MB, or 400,000 ÷ 1,024 = 390.6 GB. That is inside a 500 GB allowance, so you pay just the $20.00 base: $240.00 a year, or $0.100 per 1,000 views. The allowance covers 500 × 1,024 ÷ 2 = 256,000 page views a month. At 400,000 views you would serve 781.3 GB; the 281.3 GB over the allowance at $0.10/GB adds $28.13, for $48.13.
Sources: Amazon CloudFront pay-as-you-go pricing (data transfer out, US tiers) · Amazon CloudFront plans and free tier (1 TB/month) · HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2025: Page weight · Calculator.net: Bandwidth calculator (website bandwidth, include bot traffic)
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate website bandwidth?
Multiply monthly page views by average page weight. 200,000 views × 2 MB = 400,000 MB, which is about 391 GB a month. Add a margin for bots and peaks, and subtract what a CDN serves for you.
Does a CDN change this?
Yes. A CDN serves most static bytes from its edge network, so your origin host’s bandwidth drops sharply and you pay the CDN instead, often at a lower per-GB rate or a flat monthly price. Enter the share it serves under More options.
What is a typical page weight?
The HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac puts the median page at about 2.2 MB on mobile and 2.4 MB on desktop, with home pages heavier and images the biggest part. Check your own pages in the browser’s Network tab using a typical page, not your lightest one.
Why page views and not visitors?
Bandwidth is used per page loaded, and one visitor may view several pages. Use total page views, or sessions × pages per session, so the byte count reflects everything served.
What does “unmetered” or “unlimited” bandwidth mean?
Usually that there is no per-GB charge, but fair-use limits on CPU, memory or concurrent connections still apply, and very high traffic can lead to throttling or a request to upgrade. For those plans, set the overage price to 0 and watch the other limits.
How much does cloud egress cost per GB?
On Amazon CloudFront in the US, the first 1 TB a month is free and the next 9 TB cost $0.085 per GB (October 2026). Origin egress straight from a cloud server is often similar or higher, which is one reason to put a CDN in front.
Related calculators
Estimate only. Hosting and CDN prices change often; check your provider’s current price list and plan limits.