<b>The video host bleeding $7k a month in origin egress</b>

<b>The video host bleeding $7k a month in origin egress</b>

An indie video-tutorial host stored masters in a single cloud bucket and fronted it with a CDN. But their audience was global and long-tail: every region's edge fetched the same niche lessons cold from the bucket, and cloud egress fees ran $7,200 a month.

We enabled tiered caching. Edges no longer pull from the bucket directly; they pull from a regional mid-tier, and only the mid-tier touches origin. A lesson watched in Tokyo, Seoul, and Singapore now fetches from the bucket once for all of Asia instead of three times.

Origin egress fell from 38TB to 6TB that month. The cloud bill dropped from $7,200 to $1,150. Cache-hit ratio at the edge rose from 88% to 97% because the mid-tier kept the long tail warm.

The number that mattered: $7,200 to $1,150 in origin egress.