Dedicated nodes for the traffic that repeats, shared tiers for the traffic that spikes. One contract, one panel, two economics that suit different halves of your load.
Reply within 3 business hours. No sales sequence.
A hybrid setup is not two products bolted together. It is one rule that decides which half of your traffic goes where, and that rule is the whole design.
The heavy repeating objects sit on dedicated nodes: the release build, the popular episodes, the patch everybody pulls. Everything long-tail and unpredictable stays on the shared tiers.
Dedicated capacity in the two or three markets that carry most of your volume, shared delivery everywhere else. You stop paying for a footprint you barely use.
The split can be a rule we set once and leave alone, or it can move with the load. Both are possible. Which one you get is a configuration decision made during scoping, not a default you inherit.
The reason to run both is not redundancy. It is that a flat monthly cost and a per-terabyte rate are good at opposite things.
A fixed monthly figure per node, quoted per build. It does not care how much you deliver through it, which makes it the right home for the volume you can predict a year out.
$5.00 down to $2.50 per TB, billed on what you actually deliver. Nothing to plan, nothing wasted when a quiet month arrives. That is exactly what you want for a spike you cannot forecast.
If that sounds like reserved capacity next to on-demand, it is the same idea. The baseline goes on hardware you have already paid for, and the unpredictable part stays elastic.
We can show you one of these two lines honestly and only half of the other. Here is both, with the missing half named rather than invented.
What the shared tiers cost as volume grows:
100 TB, $415
500 TB, $1,815
1000 TB, $3,315
1500 TB, $4,565
The rate falls as you deliver more, down to $2.50 per TB, but the bill keeps climbing because you are paying per terabyte.
A dedicated node is a fixed monthly figure. It does not rise with volume, so on a chart it is a horizontal line.
How high that line sits depends on the hardware, the location and the term, which is why it is quoted per build rather than printed on a web page. Publishing a number here that did not match your quote would be worse than publishing none.
The structural part is not in doubt: a flat line always crosses a rising one. Below the crossing, metered delivery is cheaper and a hybrid build is premature. Above it, the concentrated slice of your traffic belongs on hardware. Finding your crossing point takes your actual numbers, and that is a twenty-minute conversation rather than a calculator.
The quiet advantage of a hybrid setup is that the shared network sits underneath your dedicated nodes instead of nothing at all.
If a dedicated node goes down, delivery can continue from the shared tiers rather than falling through to your origin. The failure stays inside the delivery layer where it belongs.
Whether that switch happens on its own or waits for a human is a configuration decision. Both are possible, and which one your build gets is agreed in writing during scoping rather than assumed.
Anything pinned to a region for a residency requirement does not move outside it, failover included. That rule wins over the hybrid rule every time. See GDPR Cache Servers.
Hybrid is a second step, not a starting point. Here is when it is premature.
Your traffic is spread thin and hard to predict, and no single slice of it is big enough to fill a node. Nothing here beats the public tiers for you yet. See pricing.
A recognisable slice of your traffic repeats: same files, same regions, month after month. That slice has outgrown metered pricing while the rest of your load has not.
You need your own hostname, your own routing and end-to-end isolation across the whole delivery path, not just for part of it. See Private CDN Network.
Whichever way it lands, both halves run under one contract, one panel and one API. The full ladder sits on Custom Enterprise CDN Infrastructure, next to Individual CDN Servers.
Tell us how concentrated your traffic is and what repeats. You get a reply within 3 business hours, with a split proposal or an honest answer that the shared tiers alone are still cheaper for you.
He reads every request sent from this page and replies within 3 business hours, including the reply that says the shared tiers alone are still cheaper for you. No sales sequence in between.