Networking & Delivery
Bandwidth
The volume of data transferred to and from your server, often metered and billed, especially for outbound traffic.
Bandwidth is the amount of data moving in and out of your server, and it's one of the most misunderstood lines on a cloud bill. Many VPS providers bundle a generous monthly allowance, Hetzner and DigitalOcean include terabytes with even small plans, so most sites never think about it. The hyperscalers work differently, metering transfer closely and charging for it.
The word covers two things people conflate: your allowance, how much data you can move before extra charges, and your throughput, how fast the pipe is. A plan might include 5TB of transfer on a 1Gbps port. Blow past the included allowance and overage fees kick in, sometimes steeply.
The part that catches people is that outbound data, egress, is where the real cost lives, and it's billed separately enough to deserve its own attention. A viral post or a heavy media site can generate a bandwidth bill that dwarfs the compute cost.
Go deeper
- Bandwidth and Egress Fees: The Bill Nobody Reads Until It HurtsCompute prices converged; data-transfer prices didn't. How egress actually gets billed, where the traps are, and how the providers in our catalog compare.