If you’re comparing cloudflare r2 vs s3 , you’re probably trying to cut egress bills, simplify object storage, or both—especially when your app runs on a VPS and every extra moving part shows up as latency, complexity, or surprise costs. What matters for VPS-hosted workloads When your compute lives on a VPS (say on digitalocean or hetzner ), object storage isn’t just “a bucket somewhere.” It’s part of the request path. For most VPS-hosted apps, the decision comes down to four practical questions: Egress costs : Are you paying to deliver user-facing assets (images, downloads, video) from storage? Compatibility : Can your app/tooling speak S3 APIs without rewrites? Latency & edge delivery : Can you put content close to users without bolting on more services? Operational simplicity : How many knobs do you need to turn to keep it secure and fast? If your storage is purely internal (backups, logs, ML artifacts), you’ll care more about durability and lifecycle tooling.…