Begin with the traffic, not the rate
Egress is the data your workload sends out to the internet. Inbound traffic often counts for less or nothing, so the number that decides your invoice is what leaves your servers, not what arrives. Start by writing down how many gigabytes you expect to send out in a typical month and in your busiest month.
Two prices matter most: the rate charged per gigabyte sent out, and the allowance included before any rate applies. They pull in opposite directions. A low rate rewards steady, heavy traffic, while a generous allowance rewards bursty traffic that spikes and then goes quiet.
The spread across the market is wide. On the egress and bandwidth pricing rankings, per gigabyte egress costs €0 to €0.29, and per gigabyte storage each month costs €0 to €0.29. The gap between the cheapest and the dearest listing is where your workload's shape decides who wins.
Read the included allowance first
Before you compare rates, find out how much outbound transfer arrives with the plan. A provider charging more per gigabyte can still cost less overall when its allowance covers your busiest month.
Vultr includes free outbound data transfer each month, an allowance of 1,000, and inbound transfer is included as well. It also advertises $200, $250 or $300 free credit promo codes, so trial code can cover your opening bill entirely.
Aruba bundles free egress with the entry package, an allowance of 40,000. Its VPS bandwidth allowance is listed separately as 2 TB/month, so check whether the object storage allowance and the server allowance draw on the same pool or two separate ones.
Per gigabyte rates, side by side
Aruba charges €0.05 per gigabyte of egress, and €0.011 per gigabyte per month for storage. The service is S3-compatible, and it also lists block storage, so you can keep hot data on fast disk and read it back without paying the object storage rate.
Vultr prices egress at $0 to $0.01 per gigabyte, a range that begins where the included allowance runs out and reaches its higher end on larger volumes. Inbound transfer is not billed, which matters when your service mostly retrieves content rather than serves it.
Worked example: a service that streams media to viewers burns through a small allowance in days, so the rate decides your bill. A nightly backup job that sends data once and then sleeps may sit inside the allowance all month, so the included amount decides. Fix your monthly outbound estimate before you read a single rate.
The compute bill sits next to the transfer bill
Egress usually rides on top of a plan, so compare the plan rather than the transfer rate alone. Aruba bills monthly, with an entry VPS at €1.99 covering 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB storage. Server types run from vps through bare-metal, and both Linux and Windows are offered.
Vultr gives you more ways to pay: hourly, monthly and reserved, with granularity listed as hourly. Entry cloud compute starts at $2.50, and larger configurations are listed from $10. Short billing cycles suit spiky traffic, because a machine that spins up for an event stops charging when it is switched off.
Vultr also includes a free control plane, which matters if you run container clusters and would rather not pay for the orchestration layer separately. Its GPU catalogue is long: NVIDIA GB300 NVL72, AMD Instinct MI455X and NVIDIA HGX B300, useful for teams moving training data and inference traffic at the same time.
Quotas, regions and traffic class
Where your servers sit affects how long users wait before data leaves a nearby point of presence. Aruba lists 7 regions, with IT given for its VPS offering. Vultr lists 33 locations, so a workload with a global audience has more placement choices.
Traffic class matters as much as volume. Vultr includes DDoS protection on its compute product, and it offers dedicated interconnect with customer-controlled routing and access policies, which lets large senders keep private paths rather than pushing bulk data across the public internet.
Aruba's storage types cover object and block storage, and its listed use cases are game server and forex. If your traffic pattern is bursty rather than constant, put the burst peaks against each provider's allowance before you look at the rate card.
Reliability signals and a repeatable method
Support response times tell you what happens when a transfer job stalls midway. Aruba offers support through phone, email and help centre, so a phone line and an email route are both part of the package. Each provider review covers this alongside uptime expectations.
Certifications matter when you move personal or regulated data. Aruba holds ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, while Vultr holds SOC 2+ Type II (HIPAA), ISO 27001 and ISO 27017. Vultr is the newer of the two, founded 2014 against Aruba's 1994, and the company behind it is The Constant Company, LLC, based in US.
A repeatable method: pick a month, write down your outbound gigabytes, subtract the included allowance, multiply the remainder by the per gigabyte rate, then add the plan price. Run the same numbers for every provider and the cheaper option appears on its own. Shortlists beyond these two are covered in the UpCloud and Google Cloud reviews.