A 2U server drawing 200-300 watts costs $60-$90/month to colocate at IDACORE Boise, billed at $300/kW on actual power draw — not a flat per-U rate. That's often cheaper than a comparably specced VPS once you account for CPU/RAM ceilings, noisy neighbors, and egress fees, and you own the hardware outright.
What Does a 2U Server Actually Draw?
Most 2U servers running general-purpose workloads — a database, an application server, a small Kubernetes node — pull somewhere between 150W and 350W under normal load. A dual-Xeon box with a handful of SSDs and modest RAM sits comfortably in that range. GPUs or dense NVMe arrays push it higher, but for the "one box running your app" scenario, 200W is a realistic number to plan around.
At IDACORE Boise, you're billed on what the server draws, not what rack space it occupies. That's the part people miss when they compare colocation providers. A lot of facilities quote "$99/month per U" regardless of power pulled, which punishes you if your box is efficient and lets someone with a space heater in a 1U chassis ride for free. We don't do that. Our model is simple: $300/kW/month, metered on draw.
The math for a 200W server:
0.2 kW × $300/kW = $60/month.
A 300W server runs $90/month. A 350W box with a couple of NVMe drives and a beefier CPU comes in around $105. No hidden add-ons, no "network fee," no minimum power commitment. You're not required to buy 1kW to get a rack — 1U minimum, whatever power it draws.
Why Metered Power Billing Matters
If you're colocating a single, efficient server, power-based billing works in your favor every time compared to flat per-U rates disconnected from actual consumption. Compare two providers hosting the same 200W server:
| Billing Model | Monthly Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| IDACORE Boise ($300/kW metered) | $60 | Pay for exactly what you draw |
| Flat per-U competitor ($99/U) | $99 | Same server, no power correlation |
| Flat per-U competitor with 500W minimum | $150+ | Power minimum forces overpay |
The gap widens further if your server idles most of the day — think a backup target, a low-traffic API, a monitoring stack. Metered billing means you're not subsidizing someone else's high-draw hardware in a shared cost model.
Colocation vs. VPS: When Does Colocating a Single Server Win?
This is the question that actually matters. A VPS is easy — spin it up, pay monthly, no hardware to buy. So when does dragging a physical box to Boise make sense over renting a virtual instance?
Run the numbers on a real comparison. Take a mid-tier VPS: 8 vCPU, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD, running with a major cloud provider. Depending on region and commitment, that's commonly $180-$280/month before you touch egress. Now compare a 2U server you own outright — say a used or refurbished dual-Xeon box with 128GB RAM and 2TB NVMe, drawing 250W.
- Colocation cost: 0.25 kW × $300 = $75/month
- Hardware cost: amortized over 3 years, a capable used 2U server ($1,500-$2,500) adds roughly $40-$70/month
- Total: $115-$145/month for 4x the RAM, dedicated (not shared/burstable) CPU, and no noisy-neighbor throttling
The colocated box wins on raw specs per dollar almost every time once you're past the smallest instance tiers. It also wins on something VPS pricing hides well: predictability. Your colocation bill doesn't change because your app got popular. A VPS bill absolutely does — CPU credits run out, you upgrade tiers, and if you're serving any meaningful amount of data, egress fees start showing up.
What About Egress and Bandwidth?
This is where colocation vs. VPS stops being close. Hyperscaler egress is billed per-GB and scales with your success — the more customers you serve, the more you pay, with no ceiling in sight. IDACORE's IP transit is committed bandwidth at 95th percentile billing: predictable, flat, and priced by tier, not by how much data you happen to move in a given month.
A 1G commit runs $600/month ($0.60/Mbps). If your 2U server saturates even a fraction of that serving API traffic or file downloads, you know your ceiling going in. Compare that to a cloud provider charging $0.08-$0.12/GB egress — a server pushing 5TB out in a month runs $400-$600 in egress alone, on top of your compute bill. That's before you've paid for the instance itself.
When a VPS Still Makes Sense
To be fair: if your workload is genuinely bursty, needs to scale to zero, or you need geographic distribution across a dozen regions, a VPS or cloud instance fits better. Colocation is a commitment to a physical box in a physical rack. You're not spinning up and tearing down in minutes. If you need that elasticity, this isn't the right tool.
But if you're running a steady-state workload — an internal app, a database that doesn't need to scale horizontally, a backup or monitoring server, a small SaaS backend serving a known customer base — a single colocated 2U server in Boise is often the cheaper, faster, more predictable option.
What Do You Get Beyond the Server Itself?
Colocating at IDACORE Boise isn't just cheap power billing. You're in a 1.4MW facility with N+1 UPS and cooling, so you're not relying on a single power path or a single cooling unit staying alive. Seven on-net carriers — Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric — mean you're not locked into one upstream, and if you want transit from us directly, it's our own ASN and our own BGP peering, not a resold circuit.
If your workload touches healthcare data, financial records, or government contracts, Boise is certified SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, SSAE-16, and HITRUST CSF — compliance-ready without you building that infrastructure yourself. And Idaho data residency means your data doesn't cross state lines, which matters more every year for regulatory reasons.
Support is a real person who knows your rack — not an offshore ticket queue reading a script. When your 2U box has a drive failure at 2 a.m., that difference is the whole ballgame.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it cost to colocate a single 2U server in Boise?
A 2U server drawing 200W costs $60/month at IDACORE Boise, billed at $300/kW/month on actual power draw. A 300W server runs $90/month. There's no rack space fee separate from power — you pay only for what your server consumes, with a 1U minimum and no power commitment required.
Is colocation cheaper than a VPS for a single server?
Often, yes. A mid-tier VPS (8 vCPU, 32GB RAM) commonly runs $180-$280/month before egress fees. A colocated 2U server with comparable or better specs, including amortized hardware cost, typically totals $115-$145/month at IDACORE Boise, with no egress surprises and dedicated, non-shared CPU resources.
Does IDACORE Boise require a minimum power commitment for per-U colocation?
No. IDACORE Boise has no power commitment minimum for colocation. You can colocate a single 1U or 2U server and pay only for the power it draws at $300/kW/month, with 12-month standard terms rather than the 36-month terms many enterprise providers require.
What internet providers are available for a colocated server in Boise?
IDACORE Boise is on-net with seven carriers: Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric. IDACORE also offers its own IP transit from its own ASN with BGP peering, priced by committed bandwidth tier starting at $170/month for 100Mbps, billed at 95th percentile.
Is Boise colocation compliant for healthcare or financial workloads?
Yes. IDACORE Boise holds SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, SSAE-16, and HITRUST CSF certifications, and is compliance-ready for HIPAA, financial, and government workloads. Data stays within Idaho — it does not cross state lines — which supports data residency requirements common in regulated industries.
If you've got a single 2U server idling in a closet or paying too much for VPS resources you don't need, get an exact quote based on your server's actual power draw — contact IDACORE Boise and we'll run the numbers with you before you commit to anything.
