Cloud bill rises due to data transfer costs we did not know about

Storage and compute are predictable; egress (data leaving the cloud, or moving between regions or AZs) rarely is. For SMB workloads with video, backups, or multi-region this is often where the bill leaves the trend.

Try this first

1. 1Open Cost Explorer (AWS), Cost Management (Azure), or Billing > Reports (GCP) and group by service category. Look for 'Data Transfer', 'Bandwidth', or 'Network'. Above 10-15% of total: worth digging in.
2. 2Identify flows: cross-region replication, NAT gateway to internet, users downloading from outside the region. Inter-region replication especially is a quiet but continuous cost.
3. 3For S3/GCS: do not set every bucket to cross-region replication 'just in case'. Regional is enough for most backups; cross-region only when RTO/RPO requires it.
4. 4For outbound traffic to users: put a CDN in front (CloudFront, Cloud CDN, Azure Front Door). Origin egress shrinks and CDN egress is cheaper. For video or large downloads this is almost always sensible.
5. 5Set a budget alert on the data-transfer category specifically, not only on total. You want to spot a spike in days, not at month-end.

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