Smarter Traffic, Lower Cost: Introducing Cost-Based Steering

Global delivery teams know the pressure. You need to scale traffic without scaling spend. But optimizing cost while preserving performance is harder than it should be—especially when your providers charge different rates by region.

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IO River’s new Cost-Based Steering feature gives you a direct way to manage both, at the routing level, in real time.

The Challenge: Price Gaps Across Regions

CDN pricing isn’t consistent. Some providers offer competitive rates in Europe but higher costs in Asia or Latin America. Others quietly apply egress surcharges, edge premiums, or volume thresholds that spike your bill without warning.

Until now, teams had three imperfect options:

• Manually steer traffic based on historical averages or billing reports
  
• Stick with one global provider for predictability, even if rates are suboptimal
  
• Use the cheapest provider and absorb performance risk when latency climbs
  

This works until you hit peak hours, regional congestion, or a hidden cost clause. IO River's Multi CDN Cost-Based Steering solves this by routing traffic based on both live performance and contract-aware pricing, per location.

How Cost-Based Steering Works

Cost-Based Steering is a dynamic policy layer in IO River’s real-time traffic engine. It evaluates cost and latency across your providers, then routes traffic to the best option for each region—based on thresholds you control.

Let’s say:

• Provider A is 20% cheaper in Germany but occasionally spikes in latency
  
• Provider B is more expensive but offers consistent performance

You can configure a policy that favors Provider A unless it exceeds a 50ms penalty compared to B. When that happens, IO River automatically shifts traffic to B. Once performance normalizes, traffic shifts back.

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This happens automatically. No scripts, no config files, and no DNS propagation delays. Traffic is evaluated and routed in real time, using IO River’s global performance probes and pricing logic.

A Real Example in Production

See how the same CDNs perform in different Geo locations.
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What This Means for Infra and FinOps Teams

Cost-Based Steering gives infrastructure leads and FinOps teams a shared operational lever. You can now define how much latency you're willing to trade for cost savings—and IO River enforces that in real time.

Use it to:

• Optimize cost per region without creating blind spots for performance
  
• Reduce overprovisioning, especially in high-volume delivery environments
  
• Prevent expensive reroutes caused by undetected latency spikes
  
• Simplify control over BYO contracts or IO River-managed provider blends
  

This goes hand in hand with commitment usage, which uses a virtual edge layer to automatically manage and optimize traffic across multiple content delivery networks (CDNs) based on your predefined policies.

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Whether you're optimizing video delivery, gaming APIs, or SaaS workloads, this feature keeps your cost structure aligned with real-world network behavior.

Start Steering Smarter

Cost-Based Steering is available now in all IO River environments. Set your price-performance thresholds once. Let our steering engine handle the rest.

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Want to see how your traffic could shift, and what you could save?

Book a live walkthrough.