{"head":{"title":"What Is Egress in Cloud Pricing? Data Transfer Out","description":"Egress is data leaving a cloud provider's network, often billed per gigabyte. Where it comes from, how it surprises teams, and how to keep it down.","canonical":"https://oceanlab.in/glossary/egress"},"crumbs":[{"name":"Home","path":"/"},{"name":"Glossary","path":"/glossary"},{"name":"egress","path":"/glossary/egress"}],"slug":"egress","term":"Egress (data transfer out)","aka":["data transfer out","bandwidth out"],"category":"Hosting and delivery","short":"Data that leaves a cloud provider's network, such as files sent to users, which many providers bill per gigabyte.","body":[["Data coming into a cloud (ingress) is usually free. Data going out to the internet, to another region or sometimes to another zone often has a per-gigabyte price. Video, images, downloads, API responses and backups copied elsewhere all count."],["Pricing differs a lot between providers and services. Some CDNs and storage services charge little or nothing for egress, while some clouds charge more for traffic between regions than within one."]],"why":["Egress grows with success: more users and more media mean more data out. It is easy to miss in early estimates and can become one of the larger lines in a cloud bill. It also makes moving away from a provider expensive, which adds to lock-in."],"example":["A learning platform serves course videos straight from cloud storage. As users grow, data transfer becomes the biggest item on the bill. Putting a ",{"href":"/glossary/cdn","text":"CDN"}," in front and serving lower bitrates on mobile cuts the data that leaves the cloud."],"inBuild":["We estimate egress in the hosting plan from expected users and file sizes, put a CDN in front of anything large, keep services that talk a lot in the same region, and tag traffic so the bill shows which feature drives it."],"mistakes":[["Leaving egress out of the cost estimate altogether."],["Splitting chatty services across regions or clouds."],["Serving full-size images and video to every device."]],"related":[{"href":"/glossary/cdn","label":"CDN (content delivery network)","detail":"A network of servers around the world that keeps copies of your files close to users, so pages and media load faster."},{"href":"/glossary/object-storage","label":"Object storage","detail":"A way of storing files as objects in buckets, each with an ID and metadata, reached over HTTP and built to scale to huge amounts of data cheaply."},{"href":"/glossary/edge-function","label":"Edge function","detail":"A small piece of server code that runs on a CDN's servers around the world, close to the user, instead of in one central region."},{"href":"/glossary/total-cost-of-ownership","label":"Total cost of ownership (TCO)","detail":"Everything a piece of software costs over its life, not just the price to build or buy it."},{"href":"/glossary/iaas","label":"IaaS (infrastructure as a service)","detail":"Renting raw computing, storage and networking from a cloud provider, while you manage everything that runs on it."}],"tools":[],"links":[{"href":"/pricing/categories/cdn","label":"CDN pricing","detail":"CDN and bandwidth prices, with sources."},{"href":"/pricing/categories/object-storage","label":"Object storage pricing","detail":"Storage and transfer prices, with sources."},{"href":"/pricing","label":"Pricing library","detail":"Software and API prices, each with its source and date."}],"sources":[],"legal":false,"updatedAt":"2026-10-25"}