Cloud cost optimization is essential for maintaining reliability and service quality while minimizing expenses. Exploring intermediate-level strategies, the text suggests utilizing value-added resellers to benefit from volume discounts and additional services like billing monitoring. It highlights the importance of reserving capacities not only for commonly reserved services like EC2 and RDS but also for DynamoDB to potentially reduce costs by up to 40%. The document emphasizes the need to carefully manage data transfer fees, recommending the use of services like Cloudfront for cheaper data traffic and AWS EFS for cost-free inter-zone file exchanges. Additionally, it suggests automating the transition of outdated data to cheaper storage tiers like IA and Glacier to avoid unnecessary expenses, instead of manually changing storage classes, which incurs additional costs.