A single 1U server at IDACORE Boise typically costs $60-$90/month, billed strictly on power draw at $300/kW — not rack space. A 200W server runs $60/month (0.2 kW × $300). No minimum power commitment, no 36-month contract, no per-U markup games.
Why Does Power-Based Billing Make More Sense Than Per-U Pricing?
Most colocation providers still price by rack unit. You rent 1U, 2U, 4U — and pay a flat fee regardless of what's actually drawing power. That model made sense when servers were uniform boxes pulling similar wattage. It doesn't make sense now.
A 1U server running an Intel Xeon E-2400 idling at 65W costs the facility almost nothing to power and cool. A 1U server packed with a GPU for inference work pulling 350W costs six times as much. Per-U pricing charges both customers identically. That's not fair, and it's not how we do it in Boise.
We bill $300/kW/month on your actual draw. Plug in a Kill-A-Watt reading or check your PDU, and you know your bill before we send an invoice. No guessing, no "estimated usage" line items, no surprise true-up charges at renewal.
What Does This Look Like for Real Hardware?
Here's the math for common single-server deployments:
| Server Type | Typical Draw | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Low-power edge node (Raspberry Pi cluster, ARM) | 50W | $15 |
| Standard 1U app server (dual Xeon Silver) | 200W | $60 |
| Dense 1U server (dual Xeon Gold, NVMe-heavy) | 350W | $105 |
| 1U server with single GPU (inference) | 500W | $150 |
| 2U server, high-density compute | 800W | $240 |
No rack space fee stacked on top. No "cabinet minimum" forcing you into a quarter-rack commitment you don't need. If you've got one server, you rent one rack unit and pay for the watts it pulls. That's it.
What Do You Actually Get for That Price?
A lot of budget colocation providers hit you with a low headline rate and then nickel-and-dime you on remote hands, cross-connects, and "premium" power circuits. Here's what's included at IDACORE Boise without add-on pricing games:
- N+1 UPS and cooling across a 1.4MW, 34,000 SF facility
- 7 on-net carriers: Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, Hurricane Electric
- Sub-5ms latency to Treasure Valley businesses
- SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, SSAE-16, and HITRUST CSF certifications
- 12-month standard terms — most enterprise providers lock you into 36
That certification list matters if you're running anything touching HIPAA, financial data, or government contracts. A lot of "budget" colo providers can't produce a SOC 2 Type II report. We can, and it doesn't cost extra to get one.
How Does This Compare to Cloud Hosting for a Single Server?
If you're running one server-class workload — a database, a monitoring stack, a small application backend — cloud instances get expensive fast once you factor in egress, storage IOPS charges, and reserved instance pricing.
A comparable dedicated server workload (say, 8 vCPU equivalent, 32GB RAM, NVMe storage) running as an AWS EC2 reserved instance with moderate egress often lands in the $250-$400/month range once you add EBS volumes and data transfer. The same physical hardware colocated at IDACORE Boise, drawing 250W, costs $75/month in power — plus whatever you paid for the server itself, which you now own outright instead of renting compute indefinitely.
Own the hardware once, pay for power monthly. That math favors colocation for any workload running 24/7 with predictable resource needs.
What About Bandwidth for a Single Server?
Power is half the equation. The other half is getting traffic to and from your server, and this is where a lot of single-U colocation deployments get bled dry by providers charging per-Mbps rates designed for enterprise racks, not solo servers.
We run our own ASN and peer directly at the Seattle Internet Exchange — this isn't resold transit, it's routing we control. That matters for a single-server deployment because you're not paying a markup on someone else's wholesale contract. Committed bandwidth is priced by tier:
- 100M: $150/month ($1.50/Mbps)
- 1G: $450/month ($0.45/Mbps)
- 10G: $1,350/month ($0.135/Mbps)
For a single application server, most customers land comfortably on a 100M commit with burst headroom, billed 95th percentile. Compare that to hyperscaler egress billing, where a viral traffic spike can turn a $50 month into a $500 month with zero warning. Flat per-Mbps transit doesn't do that to you.
A Real Example
A Boise-based SaaS startup came to us running a single application server handling customer authentication and API traffic — nothing exotic, just a 1U Dell R640 pulling roughly 220W under normal load. Their previous host charged a flat $150/month per-U rate regardless of draw, plus $75/month for a "premium" 1Gbps port that they rarely saturated.
At IDACORE Boise: $66/month in power (0.22kW × $300), plus a 100M transit commit at $150/month with room to burst. Total: $216/month, down from $225 — but now with SOC 2 Type II certification included, sub-5ms latency to their Treasure Valley customer base, and a 12-month term instead of the 36-month lock they'd signed elsewhere. Same hardware, better terms, transparent billing.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does 1U colocation cost in Boise?
IDACORE Boise bills 1U colocation at $300/kW/month based on actual power draw, not flat per-unit fees. A typical 200W server costs $60/month. There's no minimum power commitment and no rack space markup — you pay for the watts you use.
Is there a minimum contract length for single server colocation?
IDACORE Boise offers 12-month standard terms for colocation, including single 1U deployments. This is shorter than the 36-month terms common among enterprise colocation providers, giving smaller deployments more flexibility to scale or exit.
What carriers are available for a single server in Boise?
IDACORE Boise is on-net with seven carriers: Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric. Single-server customers can select carrier-neutral transit through IDACORE's own ASN rather than depending on a single upstream provider.
Does power-based billing cost more than flat-rate per-U pricing?
It depends on your server's draw. Low-power servers (under 150W) often cost less under power-based billing than flat per-U rates. Higher-draw servers (500W+) may cost more, but you're paying for actual consumption rather than subsidizing other tenants' usage under a blended flat rate.
What compliance certifications apply to single-server colocation in Boise?
All customers at IDACORE Boise, including single-U deployments, operate within a facility certified for SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, SSAE-16, and HITRUST CSF. This makes single-server colocation viable for HIPAA-adjacent or financial workloads without needing a dedicated compliance tier.
Running a single server that deserves better than a flat per-U rate and a 36-month contract? Talk to IDACORE about Boise colocation and get exact power-based pricing for your hardware before you sign anything.
