Free static hosting bandwidth in 2026: what you actually get before they cut you off
Published 2026-10-09
Your static site goes viral exactly once, and that’s the day you learn what your host’s free bandwidth policy really is. The four big free static hosts handle that day completely differently — one keeps serving, one throttles, one pauses your account, one sends a bill.
All numbers verified against official pricing/docs pages. Dates on the tracked data pages.
The truth table
| Cloudflare Pages | GitHub Pages | Vercel | Netlify | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free bandwidth | Unlimited | 100 GB/mo (soft) | 100 GB/mo | ~15 GB effective (300 credits, 20/GB) |
| What happens over the limit | Nothing — keeps serving | Throttling, maybe a polite email | Hard pause unless you add a card | All sites can pause until upgrade |
| Commercial use | Allowed | E-commerce prohibited | Prohibited on free | Allowed |
| Builds/month | 500 | ~10/hour soft | 6,000 minutes | ~20 prod deploys (15 credits each) |
| Custom domain + SSL | Free | Free | Free | Free |
| Card required | No | No | No | No |
What changed (and most tutorials missed)
Netlify’s quiet 85% cut
Since September 2025, new Netlify accounts get 300 credits/month instead of the old 100 GB bandwidth + 300 build minutes. At 20 credits per GB, spending everything on bandwidth gets you 15 GB — and that’s before any credits go to deploys (15 each) or function runtime. The legacy tier still exists for old accounts, which is why long-time users keep recommending a free tier that new users can’t get. Details on our data page.
Vercel’s commercial-use ban is real
The Hobby plan ToS prohibits commercial use. An ad-banner blog, a landing page for your paid app, a portfolio with “hire me” — all technically violations. Enforcement is complaint-driven and sporadic, which is worse than consistent: your site works until the day it matters most. If revenue touches the site, Vercel’s free tier was never actually available to you.
GitHub Pages is softer than people think, in both directions
The 100 GB/bandwidth and 10 builds/hour are documented as soft limits — exceed them briefly and usually nothing happens. But Pages also prohibits commercial e-commerce, requires public repos on free, and GitHub explicitly reserves the right to throttle or disable sites that strain the service. It’s hosting for projects, not products.
Cloudflare Pages: genuinely unmetered static
No bandwidth number in the docs because there isn’t one for static assets — the free plan serves whatever traffic arrives. The real limits sit elsewhere: 500 builds/month, 25 MB per file, 20K files per site, and Functions metering if you add server-side code. For pure static sites it is, as of today, simply free at any scale.
(Disclosure: this site runs on Cloudflare Pages — picked for exactly these reasons, before we had any traffic to serve.)
The viral-day scenarios
Say a post hits Hacker News front page: ~50K visits in 24h, ~2 MB per page view = ~100 GB in one day.
- Cloudflare Pages: nothing happens. This is the entire argument.
- GitHub Pages: a month of bandwidth in a day — possible throttling, site likely survives, no bill ever.
- Vercel: you blow the monthly allowance in 24h; site pauses unless you’ve pre-added a card (then it’s $20/mo Pro, prorated usage).
- Netlify (new accounts): 15 GB gone in the first 2-3 hours. Every site on the account can pause. During your biggest traffic day.
The pattern: the hosts that treat bandwidth as a metered resource fail you precisely when you succeed.
Decision shortcuts
- Default choice, any static site: Cloudflare Pages — unlimited bandwidth, no commercial restrictions, no card
- Docs/project site already living in a GitHub repo: GitHub Pages is zero-setup and fine
- Next.js with heavy ISR/image optimization: Vercel’s DX is unmatched — but if the site is commercial, budget for Pro ($20/mo) from day one; the free tier isn’t legally yours
- Netlify: hard to recommend for new accounts at 15 GB effective. Existing legacy-tier accounts: keep them, that tier is better than what new users get
When free static hosting is the wrong tool
- Server-side rendering on every request → that’s compute, not static hosting; see our PaaS decision tree
- Large media files (video, podcast audio) → 25 MB file caps and fair-use policies bite; use object storage (R2/B2) behind the same CDN
- Need SLAs and support → free tiers of anything are the wrong tool
Verified against official pricing pages 2026-10-09. When any of these policies change, the data pages update and subscribers get an alert.