Pricing one server in Boise for 2026 comes down to power draw, not rack space. IDACORE Boise charges $300/kW/month with no minimum commitment — a 200W server runs $60/month, a 400W server runs $120/month. There's no premium for buying "just" 1U, and no 36-month contract required to get it.
Why Does Power-Based Billing Matter for a Single Server?
Most colocation providers built their pricing models around rack space because that's what they had to sell — square footage. But square footage isn't the constraint anymore. Power is. Modern 1U servers pull anywhere from 150W idle to 500W+ under load, and that variance is the entire story of what your bill should look like.
Here's the math that matters: at $300/kW/month, every 100W costs you $30/month. A lean 1U box drawing 180W runs $54/month. A dual-CPU 1U server pulling 450W runs $135/month. You're paying for what the server actually consumes, not for an arbitrary "1U slot" fee that ignores whether your box sips or guzzles power.
Compare that to providers who quote a flat per-U rate regardless of draw. A $99/month 1U slot sounds cheap until you realize you're subsidizing the guy next to you running a 600W GPU box, or worse, you're the one being subsidized and the provider quietly caps your power allocation at 150W — good luck if your server needs more.
What Does This Look Like on an Actual Invoice?
Say you're colocating a single Dell PowerEdge R650 configured for a monitoring stack — dual Xeon Silver, modest RAM, no GPU. That box typically draws around 250W sustained. At IDACORE Boise:
0.25 kW x $300/kW = $75/month
Add IP transit if you need it — a 100Mbps commit runs $150/month ($1.50/Mbps), which covers most single-server workloads with room to spare. Total colocation and bandwidth: $225/month for a fully redundant, SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS-certified facility with N+1 UPS and cooling. No annual contract renewal surprises, no bandwidth overage panic.
What's the Real Cost Difference Versus Cloud?
This is where per-U colocation in Boise gets interesting for anyone running a single dedicated workload — a database server, a backup target, a monitoring node, a small application server that doesn't need to scale horizontally.
A comparable AWS EC2 instance (think c6i.2xlarge, 8 vCPU, 16GB RAM, roughly what our example 1U server delivers) runs around $245/month on-demand before you add EBS storage, data transfer, and the inevitable overage when your monitoring stack decides to ingest more logs than you forecast. Egress alone can blow past $50/month on a chatty workload, and that number is never fixed — it scales with your success, which is exactly the wrong time for your bill to spike.
| Cost Factor | IDACORE Boise (1U, 250W) | AWS EC2 Equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Base compute/colo | $75/month | ~$180–245/month |
| Bandwidth (100Mbps commit / est. transfer) | $150/month flat | $50–150/month, variable |
| Contract minimum | None | None, but pricing scales with usage |
| Data residency | Idaho, stays in-state | Multi-region, often opaque |
| Total | ~$225/month | ~$230–395/month, unpredictable |
The gap widens once you own the hardware outright instead of renting compute cycles. If you already have a server — maybe you're moving out of a closet, a spare bedroom, or an oversized enterprise contract — colocation lets you keep depreciating an asset you already paid for instead of renting equivalent capacity indefinitely.
Do I Need a Full Cabinet to Colocate in Boise?
No. IDACORE Boise has a 1U minimum with no power commitment floor. You're not required to lease a quarter-cabinet or half-cabinet just to get a foot in the door. This matters for a specific type of customer we see constantly: the business that needs exactly one server outside their office for redundancy, compliance, or latency reasons, and has zero interest in managing a rack.
We built the facility this way on purpose. A 1.4MW, 34,000 SF site with N+1 infrastructure doesn't need to gatekeep single-server customers to make the economics work — the power billing model does that math for us automatically. Whether you're colocating one box or forty, you pay for the kilowatts you draw, full stop.
What About Network Access for a Single Server?
A single server still needs real network diversity, and Boise doesn't skimp here just because you're small. Seven on-net carriers run through the facility — Zayo, Lumen/Level 3, Cogent, CenturyLink, Syringa, Cable One, and Hurricane Electric — plus our own IP transit, priced on committed bandwidth and billed at 95th percentile, not metered by the gigabyte like cloud egress.
We run our own ASN and BGP peering — a legacy of founding and operating an ISP with peering at the Seattle Internet Exchange. That means when you buy transit from us, you're buying routing decisions made by people who've managed a routing table, not a reseller markup on somebody else's circuit. For a single server, this translates to sub-5ms latency to Treasure Valley businesses and 23ms to Seattle, 22ms to Portland, 14ms to Salt Lake City — real numbers, not marketing latency.
What Compliance Does a Single Server Get in Boise?
Every server in the facility, whether it's one 1U box or a forty-cabinet deployment, sits inside the same compliance envelope: SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, SSAE-16, and HITRUST CSF certification. If you're a healthcare startup colocating a single HIPAA-adjacent application server, or a fintech running one PCI-scoped box, you get the same audited controls as our largest tenants. You're not buying a "lite" compliance tier because you're small.
This matters more than people expect. A three-person SaaS company we've talked with was paying a boutique hosting provider $180/month for a single 1U server with no compliance certification at all — meaning every enterprise sales conversation stalled on the security questionnaire. Moving that same server to Boise at $75-$90/month in colocation costs, plus transit, solved the cost problem and the sales-blocker problem in the same move.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it cost to colocate a single 1U server in Boise?
At IDACORE Boise, pricing is based on power draw at $300/kW/month with no minimum commitment. A typical 1U server drawing 200–300W costs $60–$90/month for colocation alone. Add IP transit starting at $150/month for a 100Mbps commit if you need bandwidth beyond what's included.
Is there a minimum contract length for per-U colocation in Boise?
IDACORE Boise offers 12-month standard terms, compared to the 36-month terms many enterprise colocation providers require. There's no minimum power commitment and no requirement to lease more than 1U of space, making it accessible for single-server deployments.
How is colocation billing calculated if I only need one server?
Billing is based entirely on measured power draw, not rack space. You pay $300 per kilowatt per month regardless of how much physical space your equipment occupies. A 200W server costs $60/month (0.2 kW x $300), whether it occupies 1U or sits in a quarter cabinet.
What network 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. IDACORE also operates its own ASN and BGP peering for IP transit, priced on committed bandwidth tiers from 100Mbps to 100Gbps with 95th percentile billing.
Does a single server get the same compliance certifications as larger deployments?
Yes. IDACORE Boise is SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, SSAE-16, and HITRUST CSF certified facility-wide. A single colocated server operates under the same certified controls as a full cabinet deployment, making it viable for HIPAA, financial, or government-adjacent workloads without a compliance premium.
If you've got one server that needs a real home — audited, power-billed fairly, and on a network we actually run ourselves — talk to us about colocating it in Boise and get exact pricing based on your server's actual power draw.
