Pricing & Billing
Overage Fees
Charges that kick in when you exceed a plan's included allowance for bandwidth, storage, requests, or compute.
Overage fees are what you pay for crossing a plan's included limits. A VPS bundles a few terabytes of transfer. Go past it and each extra gigabyte bills separately. A managed WordPress host includes a monthly visit count, and exceeding it during a traffic spike triggers overage charges. The base price covers a defined envelope, and stepping outside it costs extra.
The visit-count model on managed WordPress is a common surprise. Kinsta and WP Engine price by monthly visits, so a post that goes viral, exactly the good news you wanted, arrives with a bill for the traffic it drove. Bandwidth overages on VPS plans work the same way, though generous included allowances mean most sites never hit them.
The defense is knowing where your plan's ceilings are and watching your approach to them. Check your analytics against the tiers before committing, and prefer plans whose overage rates are reasonable rather than punitive, since the month you exceed the limit is the month you least want a shock.
Go deeper
- How Cloud Hosting Pricing Actually WorksHourly billing, bundled plans, egress fees, and the line items that turn an advertised price into your real bill.