If your production infrastructure sits in Seattle or Portland, your DR site shouldn't share their earthquake fault lines, wildfire smoke, or grid. IDACORE North in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho puts your failover about 45 minutes from Spokane — close enough for low-latency replication, far enough to survive a regional event. Per-U colocation starts at $300/kW/month, open for orders now.
Why Does DR Distance From Spokane Actually Matter?
Disaster recovery planning has a distance problem nobody likes to talk about. Put your DR site too close to production and you're not protecting against anything regional — a grid failure, a wildfire evacuation zone, an ice storm that takes out three counties at once will hit both sites the same day. Put it too far and you're eating latency on every replication cycle, and your RTO numbers start looking optimistic on paper and painful in a real failover.
Coeur d'Alene solves this in a way that Seattle-to-Seattle or Portland-to-Portland "redundancy" never does. IDACORE North sits about 45 minutes from Spokane by car, on a different power grid, in a different seismic zone, outside the Cascadia subduction risk that Seattle and Portland both sit on top of. That's not marketing distance. That's an actual geographic and infrastructural break between your primary site and your failover.
I've watched companies build "redundant" architecture where both sites were on PSE and Puget Sound Energy's grid, both within the same wildfire smoke advisory zone, both reachable by the same regional ISP outage. That's not DR. That's the same risk twice with extra billing.
What Does the Spokane-to-Coeur d'Alene Corridor Look Like Technically?
Spokane is a real regional network hub — it's not a backwater on the map, it's where a lot of eastern Washington and northern Idaho traffic already converges. Running your DR replication link from a Spokane-based primary (or a Spokane-adjacent office) to Coeur d'Alene means you're dealing with single-digit millisecond latency on that leg, not the 20+ ms round trip you'd see reaching into a Boise or Portland facility. For synchronous or near-synchronous database replication, that difference is the gap between a DR plan that works under load and one that just looks good in a diagram.
How Does Per-U Colocation at IDACORE North Work?
IDACORE North doesn't force you into a full cabinet if your DR footprint is two servers and a firewall. We do per-U colocation with a 1U minimum — no power commitment minimum either. You pay for what you draw, billed at $300/kW/month, the same rate structure as IDACORE Boise. A single 150W DR server runs $45/month in power. A pair of replicated database servers pulling 400W combined runs $120/month. That's the entire colocation bill outside of IP transit.
Compare that to standing up a "DR region" in AWS or Azure, where you're paying for idle compute reservations, cross-region data transfer, and egress fees that spike the one week you actually need to fail over — which is exactly when you don't want a surprise invoice.
| DR Approach | Monthly Cost (illustrative) | Latency to Spokane | Shared Risk with Seattle/Portland? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Secondary AWS region (us-west-2) | $800–$2,500+ (compute + egress) | Variable, often 15–30ms | Partial (same cloud provider risk profile) |
| Colo in Seattle/Portland | Facility-dependent, often $400+/kW | <10ms | Yes — same grid, same seismic zone |
| IDACORE North per-U colo | $45–$300 for typical DR footprint | ~5–10ms | No — separate grid, separate risk zone |
The IP transit story is identical to Boise too: committed bandwidth billed at the 95th percentile, our own ASN, our own BGP peering. A 1G commit runs $450/month ($0.45/Mbps). A 10G commit runs $1,350/month, under $0.14/Mbps. No egress surprises when your DR site suddenly goes hot and starts pushing real traffic.
What Do You Actually Need to Fail Over Successfully?
A DR site is only as good as its network path and its power reliability. IDACORE North gives you both: on-net carriers reaching Spokane and the broader Inland Northwest, and power billed transparently with no hidden ratchet clauses. When you're planning a failover architecture, that predictability matters more than raw specs — you need to know your DR site will be up and reachable the one day you actually need it, not the 364 days you're just paying to keep it warm.
Who Should Be Building DR in Coeur d'Alene Right Now?
If your primary infrastructure is in Seattle, Portland, or anywhere on the I-5 corridor, and your current DR plan is "another AWS region" or "a colo three miles from our main site," it's worth running the numbers on Coeur d'Alene. Financial services firms with compliance requirements around geographic separation, healthcare organizations needing HIPAA-compliant failover infrastructure, and regional ISPs or MSPs serving the Inland Northwest are the clearest fits — but honestly, any company treating DR as a checkbox instead of a real architecture decision should take a look.
We're not selling you on Coeur d'Alene as a primary data center market to replace Seattle. We're selling it as the second site that actually functions as a second site — different grid, different risk profile, real proximity to Spokane, and pricing that doesn't punish you for testing failovers regularly.
Frequently Asked Questions
How far is IDACORE North from Spokane?
IDACORE North, located at 2115 N Government Way in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, is approximately 45 minutes from Spokane by car. This proximity supports low-latency replication for DR architectures while keeping the site on a separate power grid and outside Seattle's seismic risk zone.
What's the minimum colocation footprint at IDACORE North?
IDACORE North supports per-U colocation with a 1U minimum and no power commitment minimum. You can colocate a single server for DR purposes without committing to a full cabinet, paying only for the power you draw at $300/kW/month.
How much does DR colocation cost at IDACORE North?
Power is billed at $300/kW/month based on actual draw. A typical DR footprint of 1–2 servers pulling 150–400W runs $45–$120/month in power. IP transit is separate, priced by committed bandwidth starting at $150/month for 100M.
Is Coeur d'Alene actually outside Seattle's disaster risk zone?
Yes. Coeur d'Alene sits on a different power grid than western Washington and outside the Cascadia subduction zone seismic risk that affects Seattle and Portland. It's also outside the Pacific Coast wildfire corridor, giving it genuine geographic separation for DR purposes.
Does IDACORE North offer the same IP transit as IDACORE Boise?
Yes. Both facilities run identical transit pricing on IDACORE's own ASN with BGP peering we manage directly: 100M at $150/month, 1G at $450/month, 10G at $1,350/month, and 100G at $9,750/month, all billed at 95th percentile on committed bandwidth.
If you're rethinking DR architecture and tired of paying cloud egress fees to test failovers you hope you never need, talk to us about building it right in Coeur d'Alene — get a per-U colocation quote from IDACORE North.
