Published: 4 October 2026
Sending 100 TB a month out of AWS's Frankfurt region costs $7,812 in egress fees alone, and Microsoft Azure charges within a few percent of that. The same traffic fits on our unmetered 1 Gbps dedicated server for €209 a month, or $246.30 if you pay in US dollars, with the server included.
Cloud platforms charge very little to bring data in and quite a lot to send it out. That outbound charge, usually called egress, is the line on the bill that grows with success: more users, more downloads, more video, more API responses. On an unmetered port you pay for the port, not the bytes. Below are the price lists side by side, so you can see where your own traffic sits.
What AWS and Azure charge to send data out
These are AWS's list prices for data transfer from its Frankfurt region to the internet, from its published price file dated 16 September 2026:
| Monthly volume | Price per GB |
|---|---|
| First 100 GB (across all regions) | Free |
| Up to 10 TB | $0.090 |
| Next 40 TB | $0.085 |
| Next 100 TB | $0.070 |
| Over 150 TB | $0.050 |
Azure charges almost the same from its Frankfurt region, Germany West Central. With its default routing, the first 100 GB a month are free, then $0.087 per GB up to about 10 TB, falling in steps to $0.05 per GB above about 150 TB, according to Azure's public retail price list.
That is egress only. The virtual machines, storage, load balancers and any traffic between zones are billed separately.
The same traffic, three ways
To pick a port, we assume your busiest hours run at about twice your monthly average, which is typical for websites and downloads. Our price is the cheapest server at that port, with the server itself included, in euros and in the US dollars checkout charges. A terabyte here is 1,000 GB:
| Sent per month | AWS egress | Azure egress | Our server, port included | Port we would use | Average rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 TB | $891 | $861 | €209 ($246.30) | 1 Gbps | 31 Mbps |
| 50 TB | $4,293 | $4,183 | €209 ($246.30) | 1 Gbps | 154 Mbps |
| 100 TB | $7,812 | $7,699 | €209 ($246.30) | 1 Gbps | 309 Mbps |
| 200 TB | $13,886 | $13,773 | €259 ($303.60) | 2 Gbps | 617 Mbps |
| 500 TB | $28,886 | $28,773 | €519 ($601.56) | 5 Gbps | 1.5 Gbps |
| 1,000 TB | $53,886 | $53,773 | €659 ($762) | 10 Gbps | 3.1 Gbps |
The break-even arrives early. At about 3 TB a month, AWS egress alone costs around $260, more than the $246.30 our entry server costs at checkout in US dollars, with its 16 cores, 128 GB of RAM and guaranteed 1 Gbps port. Past that point, every extra terabyte costs $50 to $90 on AWS, depending on volume, and nothing extra on the server.
Why a port is cheaper than a meter
A guaranteed 1 Gbps port can move up to 324 TB in a 30 day month, and the price stays the same whether you send 5 TB or 300 TB. A launch, a viral post or a big release does not produce a surprise invoice, and you can stop rationing high-resolution downloads, frequent backups or large API payloads.
When you compare offers, check two things: that the port is guaranteed rather than shared with other servers, and that "unmetered" does not hide a monthly allowance with overage. Ours is reserved for your server and has neither an allowance nor overage.
When the cloud still makes sense
Egress is not the only factor, and a fair comparison says so:
- Very spiky or short-lived workloads. If you need 50 machines for two days a month, paying by the minute beats renting servers all month.
- Heavy use of managed services. If your platform is built on managed queues, serverless functions and proprietary databases, moving it is a project, not a price change.
- Tiny traffic. Under a few terabytes a month, egress is a small line on the bill.
The hybrid that saves the most
You do not have to move everything. The biggest savings usually come from moving only the part that sends the most data:
- Downloads and media. Serve installers, video, images and backups from a dedicated server and keep the application where it is.
- Origin for a CDN. A CDN still pulls from an origin. If your origin is on AWS and your CDN is not CloudFront, every cache miss is billed as internet egress. Fetches into CloudFront are free, but CloudFront bills its own delivery per GB.
- Backups and replicas. Restoring a large backup out of cloud storage is itself an egress bill. An offsite copy on a dedicated server with large drives can be restored at line rate without a charge.
Leaving does not have to end with a big egress bill either. Since March 2024, AWS waives data transfer charges for customers who move their data off AWS; the request goes through AWS support.
If you need servers on both sides of the Atlantic, we sell the same hardware at the same price in ten European countries and in the United States, from our Ashburn location.
Working out your own number
- Take last month's data transfer out from your cloud bill, in GB.
- Divide by 324,000 to see how much of a 1 Gbps port that is at a flat rate. Double it to allow for peak hours.
- Pick the port that covers the result on the dedicated servers page, and compare the monthly price with your egress line alone.
For ports above 1 Gbps, see the 2 Gbps and 10 Gbps server pages, and our post on 10 Gbps price per terabyte.
Cloud prices are list prices in US dollars for the Frankfurt regions: AWS from its price file dated 16 September 2026, Azure from its retail price list as checked on 2 October 2026. We count 1 TB as 1,000 GB; AWS's tier boundaries are binary (its first 10 TB is 10,240 GB), so your bill may differ by a few percent. Our prices are monthly, exclude VAT and include the server. List prices change, so check them before you decide.