Egress fees used to sit quietly in the small print of a cloud contract, and now they shape where businesses choose to host their sites. For years, moving data out of a cloud platform cost little next to storage or compute. That balance has shifted as traffic grows while providers keep the same per-gigabyte charges. Site owners who chose a hyperscale platform for flexibility are discovering that flexibility comes at a metered exit. A backup job, a video upload, or a traffic spike can turn a predictable bill into a shock invoice.
What egress fees are and why they are climbing
Egress fees are the charges a cloud provider applies when data leaves its network. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud each charge nothing to bring data in, a small fee for traffic between availability zones, a larger fee between regions, and the most for traffic leaving the cloud entirely. In practice, this means a site owner pays every time a visitor downloads an image, a video, or a file from cloud storage.
The rates themselves look small on paper. Standard 2026 internet egress rates run from $0.087 to $0.12 per GB on the major hyperscalers, while zero-egress providers such as Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, and Wasabi charge nothing for standard egress. However, small numbers multiply fast once real traffic gets involved. For example, a backup job replicating a 2 TB file share to a second region every night can cost $1,200 a month in inter-region fees alone.
That kind of multiplication explains why so many cloud customers feel blindsided. Cloud bills frequently exceed forecasts by 30 to 40 percent because of data access charges rather than storage growth. Meanwhile, workloads keep changing shape, with video, backups, and automated tools all adding to outbound traffic without anyone tracking the total in real time.
How egress fees shape hosting decisions for small sites
For a small business, the sting is not the daily bill. It is the cost of leaving. A provider can price its storage attractively and still make switching painful through the exit charge alone. As a result, many operators stay on a platform not because it serves them best, but because moving feels too expensive to justify.
The numbers back this up. A company with 100 TB stored on S3 pays roughly $8,000 just in egress fees to migrate that data elsewhere. Additionally, industry analysts put the scale of the charge in context: Gartner has observed that egress typically accounts for 10 to 15 percent of a total cloud bill, while IDC's storage research found egress fees averaging 6 percent of cloud storage costs specifically.
Still, this pressure has pushed some providers to compete on the exit cost rather than just the entry price. Zero-egress providers, including Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, and Wasabi, charge nothing for standard egress, either as a blanket policy or through partner network arrangements like the Cloudflare Bandwidth Alliance. Therefore, a site with heavy media traffic can sometimes cut its bandwidth costs to almost nothing simply by choosing where it stores files, without touching the rest of its stack.
The EU is moving to ban egress fees, but not until 2027
Regulators have noticed the same pattern. From 12 January 2027, cloud providers in the EU will no longer be allowed to charge switching fees or egress fees. This applies broadly, since the rule covers infrastructure, platform, and software services alike.
In the meantime, a transition period is already in force. The Data Act became effective in September 2025, but the egress fee ban itself is delayed until January 2027 to give providers time to adjust. During this window, charges are meant to reflect real costs rather than act as a penalty for leaving.
However, the ban has a notable gap. It does not apply to ongoing multi-cloud use, since in those cases data egress is often continuous and flows both ways, and the Act permits charges for these ongoing processes. So a business running workloads across two providers at once will still pay for that traffic long after 2027. Even so, the change matters beyond Europe. For organisations outside the EU, the ban still sets a global precedent that regulators consider today's egress pricing model indefensible, giving every buyer a stronger negotiating position.
Practical fixes to lower egress fees now
Waiting for 2027 is not a strategy for most site owners. Instead, the more useful move is to reduce the traffic that triggers charges in the first place. A content delivery network sits between your storage and your visitors, serving cached copies instead of pulling fresh data every time.
This works better than most people expect. A well-configured caching strategy routinely reduces total outbound traffic by 40 to 60 percent. For media-heavy sites, pairing zero-egress storage with a partner CDN removes the fee almost entirely: Backblaze B2 combined with the Cloudflare Bandwidth Alliance gives zero egress to Cloudflare's CDN, one of the cheapest stacks for serving video at scale.
Beyond caching, it helps to batch large transfers, review backup schedules for unnecessary cross-region copies, and ask any prospective provider for a written egress rate before signing a contract. None of this requires a full migration. It simply means treating bandwidth as a cost line worth managing, rather than a detail buried in a bill you only read once a quarter.
Conclusion
Egress fees are not going away on their own, and the EU deadline is still more than a year off. What has changed is visibility: site owners now know that egress fees can double a bill overnight and make switching providers feel impossible. The fix does not require waiting for regulation. Check your current provider's egress rate, look at where your traffic actually goes, and consider whether a zero-egress storage option or a CDN in front of your media could cut the charge before it grows further. A quiet audit today is cheaper than a shock invoice next quarter.
