I have noticed our site’s S3 image service bandwidth (transfer) costs keep going up and up. The pricing is $.09/GB and that can add up pretty fast.. I assume I am not the only site with this issue? I am paying Amazon $70/month for transfer alone now, that’s more than my VM costs. The S3 storage cost is only $5/month, the whole problem is transfer charges. I don’t have any CDN or caching set up, just a totally generic Discourse running on a Linode VM using the S3 image buckets. What are bigger sites with lots of images doing? CDN (I assume that will cut costs)? Using Digital Ocean Spaces or Minio? Something else I am missing??

Can someone please confirm if this config works well in 2022 or not? :slight_smile:

We’re still using the Cloudflare setup yes.

Thanks for confirming. The setup you’re using is not full-page caching, right? Or is there any special benefit of using Cloudflare CDN over others?

[image] riteshsaini: The setup you’re using is not full-page caching, right? No, we only cache the uploads and avatars directories; see our rules above. If you try to do anything else you’re likely to break Discourse. [image] riteshsaini: Or is there any special benefit of using Cloudflare CDN over others? It’s free :slight_smile:

What about static assets like JS and CSS? If we use a CDN using this guide then it will deliver static assets as well along with uploads and avatars (if I know correctly). Then why would Discourse break if we deliver all the static assets through Cloudflare?

I can’t recall, it’s been a few years. Why not try it and report back about the results?

While this thread is active again I should follow up .. it seems that Amazon CloudFront significantly lowered their pricing. I have no idea what they did but my average AWS costs went from around $80 a month to $15 a month. This is for both S3 and CloudFront for images (only) on a site with a whole lot of images.

[image] riteshsaini: Then why would Discourse break if we deliver all the static assets through Cloudflare? Cloudflare is fine - just disable their Rocket Loader feature. With no configuration effort, it saves half the bandwidth back to my server. It might be that years ago Cloudflare didn’t work well with Discourse, but it’s not true today. It would be nice if we didn’t keep seeing doubt about it. If anyone has a specific problem, they should start a support thread here describing what’s not working.

Cloudflare has been generally good for me as well. I don’t think it caches images on the free plan though?

[image] NotSoSuper: I don’t think it caches images on the free plan though? mm, possibly, not sure how I could tell. All I know is that they tell me they’ve saved half my bandwidth. I do see they have some kind of non-free image-related offering.

S3 image bandwidth costs are getting annoying

Product Support Self-hosting

bartv (Bart ) October 23, 2025, 8:03pm 35

It’s still working fine, but it’s been six years - I’m not sure if I changed something in the mean time

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S3 image bandwidth costs are getting annoying

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