Egress Costs: The Line Item Nobody Provisioned

Two very different pricing models

The gap is large. A VPS plan may include 20 TB of transfer at no extra cost; the same 20 TB metered can exceed the compute cost several times over. For media-heavy workloads this single difference often dominates the total.

Note that Oracle Cloud includes a notably large monthly egress allowance relative to other hyperscalers, which is a genuine differentiator worth checking against your volume.

What is billed, and what is not

• Ingress — data into the cloud. Free almost everywhere.
• Egress to the internet — the main charge.
• Cross-region — billed, sometimes at close to internet rates.
• Cross-availability-zone — billed on several platforms, in both directions, which surprises people.
• Through a NAT gateway — a per-gigabyte processing charge on top of egress.
• Within one zone, private addresses — usually free.
• To the provider’s own services over a private endpoint — usually free or reduced.

Cross-zone charges are the quiet one. A multi-zone deployment with chatty services can generate significant internal transfer cost that appears nowhere in the architecture diagram.

Where the volume comes from

1. Media served from the origin. Images and video that should be behind a CDN.
2. Uncompressed API responses. Enabling compression can cut this by 70 per cent for JSON.
3. Backups leaving the provider. Necessary, but worth measuring.
4. Log shipping to an external platform. Volume grows quietly with traffic.
5. Cross-region replication configured once and never revisited.
6. Container images pulled repeatedly from an external registry by every node on every deploy.
7. Scrapers and abusive traffic, which cost real money in bandwidth.

Reducing it

• Use a CDN. CDN egress is cheaper than origin egress on most platforms, and cached responses skip the origin entirely. This is the single biggest lever.
• Compress everything textual. Brotli or gzip on HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JSON.
• Serve modern image formats. WebP or AVIF at appropriate dimensions cuts image bytes dramatically.
• Use private endpoints for object storage and provider APIs so traffic avoids NAT and internet paths.
• Keep chatty services in one zone, with redundancy at the service level rather than constant cross-zone chatter.
• Cache container images in a registry within the same region.
• Rate limit abusive clients before they consume bandwidth.

Estimate before you commit

A rough calculation prevents most surprises:

1. Average response size, including assets, multiplied by monthly page views.
2. Add API traffic: average payload multiplied by request count.
3. Add file downloads and media streaming, which usually dominate if present.
4. Add backups and log shipping.
5. Add 30 per cent for retries, bots and growth.
6. Multiply by the provider’s per-gigabyte rate, or compare against the included allowance.

Do this for two candidate providers and the comparison often looks very different from the instance-price comparison.

The egress-out clause

Several major providers now waive egress charges for customers permanently leaving the platform, following regulatory pressure in Europe. It typically requires a formal request and applies to a full migration rather than ongoing transfer.

It is worth knowing about if you are planning a move, and it does not change the economics of day-to-day operation.

Common questions

Where to go next

See CDN and caching and hyperscaler versus VPS provider.