Server Colocation, Bought the Way It Should Be: Providers Competing for You

Colocation is renting space, power and cooling in a data centre for hardware you own. The rack is the easy part to compare and the least important. This hub covers what actually decides the bill and the experience, and puts facilities in competition for your footprint.

What You Are Actually Renting

Colocation providers sell space measured in rack units, a full rack, a locked cage or a private suite. But the space is rarely the constraint. Power is, and it is the reason two quotes for the same amount of rack space can differ substantially.

You are also buying the things that make the space usable: conditioned power with battery and generator backup, cooling engineered for the heat your equipment produces, physical security, and access to networks. That last item is frequently the real reason for choosing a particular facility.

The distinction from managed hosting is ownership. In colocation the hardware is yours: you buy it, you maintain it, you replace failed components. The facility provides the environment and the connectivity, not the server.

Power Is the Real Unit of Sale

Understanding how the bill is constructed prevents most colocation surprises.

Cross Connects and Carrier Neutrality

A cross connect is a physical cable inside the facility joining you to another tenant: a carrier, a cloud on-ramp, a peering exchange or a partner. For most colocation customers this is the single most consequential thing about the building, and it is easy to overlook while comparing rack prices.

A carrier-neutral facility hosts many networks and lets you connect to any of them. A facility operated by a carrier may permit only its own network, or price connections to competitors in a way that discourages them. Neither is dishonest, but they produce very different futures: in the first you can change providers without moving hardware, in the second you cannot.

Ask for the list of networks present in the building and the monthly cost per cross connect. Those two facts tell you more about your next five years than the rack rate does.

Judging the Facility Itself

Tier classifications are a useful shorthand for redundancy, but they describe design rather than operation. A well-run facility with a modest design outperforms a badly run one with an impressive certificate, so ask operational questions.

Ask about power: are there genuinely independent A and B feeds, how long the battery holds, how often generators are tested under load, and how much fuel is stored. Ask about cooling and what happens to your cabinet when a unit fails. Ask what power density per rack is supported, because dense modern equipment can exceed what older facilities were built for.

Then ask about access. Who can enter, how identity is checked, how a visitor is authorised at two in the morning, and what remote hands will and will not do. If you are hours away from the building, the remote hands agreement matters more than the tier rating.

Colocation, Cloud or On-Premises

Colocation sits between running hardware in your own building and renting compute from a cloud provider, and it wins in a specific set of circumstances rather than universally.

It beats on-premises when your building cannot deliver the power, cooling, physical security or network diversity that a purpose-built facility can, which is true of most offices. It beats cloud when workloads are steady and predictable, when you already own hardware with useful life left, or when data residency and control requirements are strict.

Cloud wins when demand is spiky or growing unpredictably, because you are paying for capacity by the hour rather than committing to it. Plenty of organisations run both, keeping steady workloads in colocation and elastic ones in cloud, and that hybrid is usually a deliberate cost decision rather than indecision.

How the Colocation Marketplace Works

Facilities differ more in what surrounds the rack than in the rack itself, so quotes need the full requirement to be comparable.

• Tell us the footprint and powerRack units or racks, and the power draw. Power drives the price more than space.
• Facilities quote the whole packageSpace, power, cross connects and bandwidth, on the same basis.
• Compare the connectivityWhich networks are in the building, and what a cross connect costs.

What to Check Before You Sign

Moving hardware once is expensive. Moving it twice because of something unasked is worse.

• How is power billed? Committed circuit, metered use, or both. Establish how overage is charged.
• Is the second feed truly independent? A and B feeds are only redundant if they do not share a failure point.
• What does a cross connect cost? Monthly, per connection, and whether connecting to competitors is permitted.
• Which networks are in the building? This decides whether you can change carriers without moving hardware.
• What is the remote hands agreement? Response time, hourly rate, minimum increment and what they will not touch.
• What power density per rack is supported? Dense equipment can exceed what older facilities were designed for.
• How does access authorisation work? Including out of hours and for contractors you send.
• What are the escalation and notification paths? How you are told about maintenance, and how you raise an incident.

Server colocation, answered