If you’re deciding cloudflare r2 vs s3 , the “best” answer depends less on raw durability marketing and more on your VPS hosting pattern: egress-heavy content, multi-region needs, API compatibility, and how much operational complexity you can tolerate. 1) The non-obvious difference: egress economics The headline most people know: Cloudflare R2 doesn’t charge egress fees (to the public internet). S3 does (unless you’re staying inside AWS or using specific optimizations). For VPS hosting, this is a big deal because your compute is typically not inside AWS. Here’s the practical implication: If your VPS serves lots of bytes (images, downloads, video snippets, backups you restore often), S3 egress can dominate your bill. If your traffic stays in AWS , S3 can be cost-efficient and operationally clean. If your stack is “VPS + CDN + object storage,” R2 often wins because the CDN story is straightforward when you already use Cloudflare.…