A single 2U server in Boise colocation runs $30–$90/month depending on power draw, billed at $300/kW/month with no rack minimum. A 250W server costs $75/month flat — no cabinet lease, no long-term commit beyond a 12-month term, no per-U markup games.
Why Does One Server Even Need Colocation?
You've got a server. Maybe it's a database box, a build server, a piece of hardware that runs a stateful workload you don't want sitting in your office closet or under someone's desk. It doesn't need a cabinet. It doesn't need 20U. It needs power, cooling, network, and someone who isn't going to trip over the power cable.
That's per-U colocation, and most facilities don't want to sell it to you. They want full or half cabinet minimums because the sales math works better for them. IDACORE Boise doesn't do that. 1U minimum, and you're billed on what the server actually pulls off the PDU — not on how much floor space you're occupying.
How Is the Bill Actually Calculated?
The formula is dead simple: kW draw × $300. No tiers, no bundled minimums, no "starting at" pricing that turns into something else once you call sales.
Example: pricing a real 2U server
Say you're colocating a 2U server — dual Xeon, a handful of NVMe drives, maybe a GPU for inference. Idle-to-load power draw for a box like this typically sits between 200W and 400W depending on utilization.
| Power Draw | Monthly Power Cost | Annual Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 150W (light workload) | $45.00 | $540 |
| 250W (typical 2U) | $75.00 | $900 |
| 400W (GPU-assisted) | $120.00 | $1,440 |
| 600W (dense compute) | $180.00 | $2,160 |
That's it. That's the bill. No cabinet fee stacked on top, no "cross-connect required" surprise, no minimum commitment that assumes you're renting more power than you use.
Compare that to a lot of "per-U" pricing in the industry, where the U-space itself carries a flat fee regardless of power draw — so a 150W server and a 600W server cost the same, and you're either overpaying or under-provisioned. Billing on actual power draw means the guy running a lean edge node isn't subsidizing the guy running a space heater.
What Do You Get for $75/Month?
At $300/kW, that 250W server isn't just buying you a rack slot. It's buying:
- N+1 UPS and cooling in a 1.4MW, 34,000 SF facility — you're not the single point of failure for your own power
- 7 on-net carriers (Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, Hurricane Electric) — you're not locked into a single upstream
- Sub-5ms latency to Treasure Valley businesses, if that matters to your use case
- Compliance certifications — SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, SSAE-16, HITRUST CSF — that matter even for a single server if it touches regulated data
- 12-month terms, not the 36-month lockups enterprise providers push
That last point matters more than people give it credit for. A single server deployment is often a test — a pilot, a DR node, a first step into colocation before you commit to a full cabinet. Locking that into a 3-year term doesn't match the risk profile. 12 months does.
Colocation vs. VPS/Cloud for a Single Server Workload — What's the Real Number?
Here's where it gets interesting for 2026 budgeting. If you're running a persistent workload — not spiky, not bursty, just steady — a single dedicated server in colocation beats an equivalent cloud VM on cost almost every time, and it's not close once you factor in egress.
Take a workload comparable to a mid-tier cloud VM: 4 vCPU, 16GB RAM, moderate storage, moderate outbound traffic. On AWS or Azure, you're commonly looking at $150–$300/month for compute alone, before egress, before storage IOPS charges, before the surprise bandwidth bill in month four when your traffic pattern changes.
In Boise colocation:
| Cost Component | Cloud VM (typical) | IDACORE Boise (owned 2U server) |
|---|---|---|
| Compute | $150–$300/mo | Hardware amortized (you own it) |
| Power/hosting | Included/opaque | $75/mo (250W @ $300/kW) |
| Egress bandwidth | $0.05–$0.09/GB, unpredictable | Flat transit: 1G commit at $600/mo, no per-GB surprise |
| Contract | Monthly, but pricing shifts | 12-month term, published pricing |
The IDACORE numbers shown here reflect 30-40% savings versus comparable hyperscaler workloads once you're not paying cloud markup on compute you could own outright. The bigger lever, though, is predictability. Egress on cloud platforms scales with your success — the more traffic you get, the more you pay, and the bill is genuinely hard to forecast. IP transit priced by commit tier doesn't do that. A 1G commit is $600/month whether you push 400Mbps or 950Mbps of it. That's the number you budget with, not the number you brace for.
What About IP Transit for a Single Server?
You don't need to buy transit from a third-party reseller sitting on top of a cage you're renting a shelf in. IDACORE runs its own ASN and does its own BGP peering — this is infrastructure we built and operate ourselves, going back to running an ISP with its own peering at the Seattle Internet Exchange. That matters even for a one-server deployment, because your routing isn't dependent on someone else's business decisions about which carriers to keep.
For a single 2U server, most customers don't need more than a 100M or 1G commit:
- 100M: $170/month ($1.70/Mbps)
- 1G: $600/month ($0.60/Mbps)
Both billed 95th percentile, on-net across all IDACORE facilities. No egress surprises, no per-GB line item you have to explain to finance in Q3.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it cost to colocate a single server in Boise?
Cost is based on power draw at $300/kW/month, with no rack space minimum. A typical 2U server pulling 250W runs $75/month. Lighter loads (150W) run $45/month; GPU-assisted or dense compute boxes pulling 400–600W run $120–$180/month. There's no separate cabinet or per-U fee stacked on top.
What's the minimum colocation commitment at IDACORE Boise?
1U minimum with no power commitment minimum — you're billed purely on actual draw. Standard terms run 12 months, compared to the 36-month terms typical among enterprise colocation providers. There's no requirement to lease more rack space or power than a single server actually needs.
Is single-server colocation cheaper than a cloud VM in 2026?
For steady, persistent workloads, yes — often significantly. A comparable cloud VM commonly costs $150–$300/month in compute alone before unpredictable egress charges. A colocated 2U server at IDACORE Boise runs $45–$180/month in power depending on draw, plus a flat, published transit rate with no per-GB egress surprises.
Do I need to buy a full cabinet to colocate one server in Boise?
No. IDACORE Boise supports per-U colocation with a 1U minimum — you're not required to lease a half or full cabinet. This is designed specifically for single-server deployments, DR nodes, and pilot projects that don't need dense rack space.
What carriers and network options are available for a single server in Boise?
IDACORE Boise is on-net with 7 carriers — Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric — plus IDACORE's own IP transit from its own ASN, priced from $170/month for a 100M commit, billed 95th percentile with no egress surprises.
If you've got a single server that needs a real home — real power redundancy, real carrier diversity, and pricing that doesn't punish you for keeping your footprint small — get exact numbers for your hardware's power draw and see the full monthly bill before you sign anything. Talk to IDACORE about single-server colocation in Boise.
