If you’re running apps on a VPS, cloudflare r2 vs s3 is no longer an academic debate—it directly affects your bandwidth bill, latency, and how painful “oops, we egressed 20TB” feels at the end of the month. What R2 and S3 are (and what VPS builders care about) Amazon S3 is the default object storage API for the internet: durable, feature-rich, and supported by basically every tool. Cloudflare R2 is a newer S3-compatible object store designed around one big idea: no egress fees (at least from R2 itself). In VPS hosting workflows, object storage usually backs: Static assets and media uploads Backups/snapshots (app-level, not hypervisor-level) Log archives and data exports CDN origins for websites If you host on providers like digitalocean or hetzner , you’re typically trying to keep costs predictable while still getting global performance. Object storage is the easiest place to accidentally blow that up.…