A single U at IDACORE Boise costs whatever your power draw costs — $300/kW/month, metered on actual consumption, not rack space rented. A 200W server runs $60/month (0.2 kW × $300). No minimum power commitment, no rack-space markup, no hidden cross-connect fees. You pay for watts, period.
Why Bill on Power Instead of Rack Space?
Most colocation pricing is a shell game. You rent a quarter cabinet, a half cabinet, a full cabinet — and the price is set by the metal, not the electrons. That model made sense in 2005 when everyone racked the same 1U pizza boxes at similar density. It doesn't make sense now.
A single 1U server pulling 150W and a 1U server pulling 800W are not the same customer. Under rack-space billing, they pay the same. Under power billing, the 800W box pays more — because it costs us more to feed and cool. That's not a pricing trick. That's just physics matching invoicing.
We run Boise at $300/kW/month against Idaho Power's commercial rate of roughly $0.055/kWh — about half the national average. That headroom is what lets us hold this rate with N+1 UPS and cooling backing it up, instead of quietly cutting corners on redundancy to protect margin.
What Does This Actually Cost for a Small Deployment?
Here's the math for common single-U scenarios at Boise:
| Equipment | Power Draw | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Low-power edge server (100W) | 0.1 kW | $30 |
| Standard 1U server (200W) | 0.2 kW | $60 |
| Dense compute 1U (400W) | 0.4 kW | $120 |
| Small NAS/storage node (150W) | 0.15 kW | $45 |
| Dual-PSU 1U app server (300W) | 0.3 kW | $90 |
Compare that to a typical quarter-cabinet colocation contract elsewhere in the region, which often starts at $250–$400/month regardless of whether you're running a 100W appliance or a 600W box. If you're deploying a single lightweight server — a DNS secondary, a monitoring node, a small backup target — you shouldn't pay cabinet-tier pricing for a rack-shelf footprint. At Boise, you don't.
This also means you're not locked into buying capacity you don't need just to get a foot in the door. Start with 1U. Grow into a half cabinet when the workload justifies it. The billing model scales with you instead of forcing a step-function commitment.
What About Power Draw That Changes Over Time?
Power draw isn't static — a server idling at 120W under light load might spike to 250W under batch processing. We meter actual draw, so your bill reflects what the equipment pulled, not a worst-case estimate baked into a contract. If your workload is bursty, you're not pre-paying for peak capacity you rarely touch.
What Do You Get Besides the Rack Slot?
Per-U customers at Boise aren't a second-class tier bolted onto a colocation facility built for hyperscale tenants. The facility is 1.4MW and 34,000 square feet with N+1 UPS and cooling — the same infrastructure backing full-cabinet deployments backs your single U.
You also get carrier choice from day one. Boise is on-net with seven carriers: Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric. That matters even at 1U scale — if you're running anything customer-facing, carrier diversity is what keeps you up when one provider has a bad day.
If compliance matters to your workload, Boise is certified SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, SSAE-16, and HITRUST CSF, and is compliance-ready for HIPAA, financial, and government deployments. A single U running a compliance-scoped application doesn't need to rent a data center — it needs to sit inside one that's already been audited.
Terms are 12 months standard, where most enterprise providers push 36-month contracts even for small footprints. If you're not sure your deployment will look the same in three years — and who is — that difference matters.
How Does This Compare to Running It Yourself in the Cloud?
If you're currently running a small instance in AWS or Azure to avoid colocation logistics, run the numbers before you assume cloud is cheaper. A modest always-on compute instance with attached storage and moderate egress frequently lands north of $150–$250/month once you account for compute, storage, and bandwidth — for capacity a 300W physical 1U server would deliver at Boise for $90/month in power, plus transit priced separately at committed-bandwidth rates instead of unpredictable per-GB egress.
We peer this network ourselves — our own ASN, our own BGP sessions, built by people who ran an ISP and peered at the Seattle Internet Exchange. Transit isn't a reseller markup here. It's engineered.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does 1U colocation cost in Boise, Idaho?
IDACORE Boise bills $300/kW/month based on actual power draw, not rack space. A typical 200W 1U server costs $60/month. There's no minimum power commitment and no separate rack-space fee — you pay only for the electricity your equipment consumes.
Is there a minimum commitment for per-U colocation at Boise?
No. IDACORE Boise has no minimum power commitment for per-U colocation. You can deploy a single 1U server drawing as little as 50–100W and pay accordingly, with 12-month standard contract terms rather than the 36-month terms common at enterprise providers.
Does Boise colocation pricing include bandwidth?
No, power and IP transit are billed separately. Transit is priced by committed bandwidth tier at 95th percentile billing — for example, 1G commit runs $600/month ($0.60/Mbps). Boise is on-net with seven carriers including Zayo, Lumen, Cogent, and Hurricane Electric.
How does Boise's per-kW pricing compare to hyperscaler egress billing?
Boise's power pricing is flat and predictable: $300/kW/month regardless of traffic patterns. Hyperscaler egress bills per-GB and scales with your traffic success, making costs hard to forecast. IP transit at Boise follows the same predictable model — a 10G commit runs $2,000/month flat.
What certifications does IDACORE Boise carry for compliance-sensitive workloads?
IDACORE Boise is certified SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, SSAE-16, and HITRUST CSF, and supports HIPAA, financial, and government workloads. This applies to per-U deployments as well as full cabinets — the same audited infrastructure and N+1 UPS/cooling covers both.
Ready to see what your actual equipment costs to run at Boise instead of guessing from a rack-space price sheet? Contact IDACORE for a power-based quote on your 1U deployment.
