If you’re running a VPS and trying to pick object storage, cloudflare r2 vs s3 is the comparison that keeps coming up—mostly because egress bills can quietly become your largest “surprise” expense. What you’re really choosing: economics vs ecosystem Amazon S3 is the default because it’s everywhere: every tool supports it, every SDK is battle-tested, and every ops person has touched it. But S3’s pricing model (especially egress and request costs) is the tax you pay for that gravity. Cloudflare R2’s pitch is blunt: S3-compatible object storage with no egress fees (within Cloudflare’s network). That changes the math for VPS-hosted apps that push lots of media, backups, or downloads. On a typical VPS stack—say compute on digitalocean or hetzner —object storage is often the first service you “outgrow” from a local disk.…