The Cloud Rent Keeps Going Up. Let’s Fix It.

If you run modern applications at scale, you’ve likely noticed a familiar pattern: infrastructure costs that look reasonable at first, then quietly grow more expensive as traffic and data usage increase, or they force you to bundle more services to keep cost efficiency.

In particular, data egress pricing has become a significant and often underestimated driver of cloud spend. As applications scale and content becomes more dynamic, every trip back to the origin carries a real cost. What once felt like a rounding error can quickly turn into meaningful line items.

At Fastly, we believe customers should have more control over both performance and economics. The good news is that with the right architecture and the right platform you can materially reduce unnecessary origin traffic and insulate yourself from rising egress costs.

Here’s how to start today.

1. Treat Cache Hit Ratio as a Business Metric

Cache Hit Ratio (CHR) has always mattered for performance. Today, it matters just as much for cost control. Treating CHR as a business metric - not just an engineering one - drives more intentional decisions.

Teams often undermine CHR unintentionally: overly aggressive purges, conservative TTLs, or default caching behavior that isn’t aligned with how content is actually used. Being intentional with cache headers and expiration policies can dramatically reduce origin traffic without sacrificing freshness.  Here are a few additional examples our team can help you with to further increase your cache hit ratio:

A) Normalize Your Request Keys

You can drastically consolidate your cache by "cleaning" requests before they hit the lookup stage.

• Query String Sorting: Ensure ?a=1&b=2 and ?b=2&a=1 are treated as the same key.

• Removing Marketing Params: Strip out utm_source, gclid, or fbclid before the cache lookup. These add no value to the content being served but create infinite cache misses.

• Header Normalization: If you vary on Accept-Encoding, normalize it so that gzip, deflate and deflate, gzip don't create two separate cache entries.

B) Leverage "Stale" for Resilience and Speed

Use headers that allow the CDN to be smart when your origin is under pressure.

1. stale-if-error: If your origin goes down or returns a 5xx error, tell the CDN to keep serving the cached version for an extra hour (or day).

2. stale-while-revalidate: The user gets the slightly old version instantly while the CDN fetches the update in the background.

C) Smart Purging with Surrogate Keys

Aggressive "Purge All" commands are CHR killers. Instead use:

• Tagging: Tag content with Surrogate-Key headers. For example, a blog post might have keys for post_123, author_45, and category_marketing.

• Targeted Invalidation: When a post is edited, purge only post_123. The rest of your cache remains warm and your egress costs stay flat.

The Bottom Line: Better CHR = Lower Cloud Bills.  Stop paying your cloud provider for redundant compute cycles.  Let the edge do the heavy lifting.

2. Consolidate Traffic with Origin Shield

Even with a high cache hit ratio, a global traffic spike can still overwhelm your origin. Without a "shield," every Fastly POP around the world that experiences a cache miss will reach out to your origin simultaneously.

Fastly Origin Shield acts as an intermediary caching layer. Instead of 90+ locations fetching the same update from your cloud provider, they all check in with a single designated Shield POP first.

This approach delivers two key benefits:

• Request collapsing: Multiple requests for the same piece of content are "collapsed" into a single request to your origin.

• Massive egress savings: By centralizing fetches, you aren't just protecting your server's CPU, you are preventing dozens of duplicate egress charges for the exact same byte of data.

3. Use Cache Reservation for High-Value Content

Large files with steady demand (like popular images, videos, and software packages) can be expensive to repeatedly retrieve from origin if they’re evicted under normal cache pressure. Cache Reservation addresses this directly.

With Cache Reservation, you can protect specific objects from eviction across Fastly’s network. That means predictable availability at the edge, fewer origin fetches, and more consistent cost behavior.

For many customers, the return on investment is straightforward: reserving cache for the right assets often costs less than repeatedly paying to retrieve them.

4. Rethink Where You Store and Serve Large Assets

For teams looking to go further, it’s worth reconsidering where heavy assets live in the first place.

Fastly Object Storage was designed to eliminate a fundamental inefficiency in traditional architectures: storing data in one place and paying a premium every time users request it. With Fastly Object Storage, there are no egress fees for serving content from the edge.

By storing and serving images, video libraries, and binaries directly on Fastly’s platform, customers simplify their architecture and remove an entire class of variable costs.

5. Gain Real-Time Visibility with Origin Inspector

You cannot manage what you cannot measure. Many teams only realize they have a cost spike when the monthly bill arrives, making it impossible to pin down which specific application or behavior caused it.

Fastly Origin Inspector provides a real-time and historical view of the data flowing from your origins to the Fastly edge. This visibility allows you to:

• Identify "chatty" origins: Pinpoint exactly which services are driving up egress costs.

• Validate optimizations: See the immediate impact of a new caching policy or Cache Reservation on your origin traffic.

• Forecast spend: Use precise data to predict future cloud costs based on actual traffic patterns.

By turning on Origin Inspector, you move from reactive billing surprises to proactive cost management.

The Takeaway

Cloud providers will always optimize their platforms around their own business models. That’s not a criticism, it’s reality.

What matters is whether you have the tools to optimize for your users, your performance goals, and your budget. With disciplined caching, protected edge storage, and an edge-native approach to serving content, you can regain control over both cost and scale.

Rising infrastructure costs don’t have to be inevitable. With the right strategy, they’re a design choice.

Want to learn how Fastly can help lower your infrastructure costs? Get in touch.