Egress

Egress is the data that leaves a cloud provider's network — typically the bytes served to users when they download files or load assets. Most object-storage providers bill egress per gigabyte, so a popular file or a busy CDN can make bandwidth, not storage, the dominant line on your bill.

Storing data is cheap; moving it out is where the meter spins. Egress fees are charged on bytes that exit the provider's network — to the public internet, sometimes even to another region or another cloud. Because the price is per gigabyte served, costs scale with traffic, not with how much you keep.

This is why a single viral asset, a misconfigured cache, or a hotlinked image can produce a surprise invoice that dwarfs your storage cost. It's also why providers that waive or cap egress have become popular for delivery-heavy workloads like media, downloads, and static sites.

To control egress: cache aggressively at the CDN edge so repeat requests never touch origin, set sensible Cache-Control headers, compress responses, and avoid serving full-resolution assets where a smaller variant would do.

Related terms

CDN

A CDN (content delivery network) is a globally distributed set of servers that cache copies of your files close to users. When someone requests an asset, the nearest edge location serves it instead of your origin, cutting latency and offloading traffic. CDNs speed up images, video, downloads, and static sites worldwide.

Content delivery network

A content delivery network works by caching your files at edge locations worldwide and routing each user to the nearest one, usually via anycast DNS. The edge serves cached copies directly; on a cache miss it fetches from your origin once, stores the result, then serves every later request locally.

Cache-Control

Cache-Control is an HTTP header that tells browsers and CDNs how to cache a response — for how long, and whether they may store it at all. Directives like max-age, public, private, no-cache, and immutable set freshness, control revalidation, and decide how aggressively an asset is reused.

Object storage

Object storage is a way to store data as discrete objects — the file bytes plus metadata and a unique key — in a flat namespace instead of a file-system hierarchy. It scales to billions of objects, is accessed over HTTP APIs, and underpins most cloud file storage, backups, and static assets.

How files.link fits in

Egress pricing is exactly why files.link bundles delivery into simple prepaid usage instead of metering bandwidth as a separate gotcha line item. storage without egress surprises.

Get started

← Back to the glossary