If you run infrastructure in Spokane, your DR site shouldn't be in the same weather system, on the same power grid, or a plane ride away. IDACORE North in Coeur d'Alene sits ~45 minutes from Spokane, bills colocation at $300/kW/month with no space-based fees, and is open for active orders today — not a roadmap promise.
Why Does Distance Matter for a Spokane DR Site?
Disaster recovery planning has a distance sweet spot, and most companies get it wrong in one of two directions. Too close, and you're on the same power grid, same regional fiber routes, same weather event. A windstorm that takes out Spokane's grid can just as easily take out a "DR site" sitting inside city limits. Too far, and you've traded resilience for latency and operational friction — a DR site in Denver or Dallas means your team can't drive there on a Saturday when something goes sideways.
Coeur d'Alene solves this specific problem. It's close enough that your Spokane-based engineers can physically get to the rack in under an hour, but it's a different utility service area, different local infrastructure, and geographically separated from Pacific Coast seismic and wildfire risk zones that threaten sites further west. That's a real distinction — Idaho and Eastern Oregon sit outside the fault lines and fire corridors that keep West Coast facility operators up at night.
I've run infrastructure through enough regional outages to know that "the cloud provider has multiple availability zones" doesn't mean much when the zones are 12 miles apart and share a power substation. Real DR requires real separation. Coeur d'Alene gives Spokane companies that separation without giving up the drive-time convenience that makes DR testing and emergency response actually practical.
What Does a DR Deployment at IDACORE North Look Like?
This is where per-U colocation matters more than most DR plans account for. You don't need a full cabinet of replicated infrastructure sitting idle 360 days a year waiting for a disaster. You need enough compute to fail over your critical systems, and IDACORE North will rent you a single rack unit for exactly that.
Say you're running a mid-size SaaS platform out of Spokane with a database server and two application servers as your DR footprint — call it 600W combined draw. At $300/kW/month, that's $180/month for the power those three servers actually pull. You're not paying for a cabinet you don't need or a per-U line-item fee — you're billed for the electricity your DR gear consumes, period. No power commitment minimum, no wasted spend on standby capacity you're not using.
Compare that to what a lot of regional providers quote: a flat per-U or per-cabinet rate regardless of what your gear draws. Typical market per-U rates run $75-$150/month per unit as a space charge, independent of power consumption — you're paying for the slot, not the electricity. That model punishes efficient hardware and rewards nothing. IDACORE North's model means a low-power DR footprint costs you what it actually costs to run.
Full Cabinet DR for Higher-Draw Workloads
If your DR replication needs more horsepower — active-active database clusters, real-time replication targets, whatever your RPO demands — full cabinet colocation is available at North with the same $300/kW/month billing. A cabinet running 3kW of DR infrastructure runs $900/month. Same power-based pricing, same transparency, whether you need 1U or 40U.
How Does Network Connectivity Work for Failover?
DR is only as good as your failover path, and that comes down to IP transit, not just physical proximity. IDACORE runs its own ASN and BGP peering — we're not reselling a Tier 1's transit and marking it up. That matters for DR because when Spokane goes down and traffic needs to shift to Coeur d'Alene, you want routing decisions made by people who understand your traffic patterns, not a ticket queue three time zones away.
Transit at North is priced identically to Boise, on committed bandwidth with 95th percentile billing:
| Commit Tier | Monthly Price | Per-Mbps |
|---|---|---|
| 100M | $170 | $1.70 |
| 1G | $600 | $0.60 |
| 10G | $2,000 | $0.20 |
| 100G | $11,050 | $0.111 |
For a DR site, a 1G commit is often enough to handle failover traffic for a mid-size application without over-provisioning bandwidth you'll rarely use at full capacity. And because it's flat, predictable, committed billing — not per-GB egress — you can actually budget for a disaster instead of getting surprised by a bill on top of an outage.
What About Compliance and Uptime During Failover?
North runs the same power pricing and connectivity story as Boise, and IDACORE's compliance posture applies across facilities: SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, SSAE-16, and HITRUST CSF certifications, with infrastructure that's compliance-ready for HIPAA, financial services, and government workloads. If your production environment in Spokane or the Treasure Valley has to meet these standards, your DR site needs to meet them too — a failover environment that drops your compliance posture isn't a real DR plan, it's a liability with extra steps.
Idaho data residency is part of this too. Data doesn't cross state lines at IDACORE facilities, which simplifies your compliance story when auditors ask where customer data lives during a failover event.
A Real-World Example
A regional credit union in Spokane runs its core production environment in-house with a compliance mandate requiring geographic separation for DR. Their setup at IDACORE North: two application servers and a replicated database server, drawing roughly 800W combined, plus a 1G transit commit for failover traffic. Monthly cost: $240 for power (0.8kW x $300) plus $600 for transit, totaling $840/month for a compliant, tested DR environment 45 minutes from their primary site. Compare that to standing up equivalent infrastructure in a hyperscaler region with egress fees that spike unpredictably during an actual failover event — when you need bandwidth most, that's exactly when per-GB billing punishes you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is IDACORE North open for new colocation orders right now?
Yes. IDACORE North at 2115 N Government Way in Coeur d'Alene is open and accepting active orders today. This isn't a pre-leasing or future-capacity situation — you can deploy a single rack unit or a full cabinet now, with power billed at $300/kW/month.
How far is IDACORE North from Spokane?
IDACORE North sits approximately 45 minutes from Spokane by road. That distance gives Spokane-based companies a DR site close enough for practical testing and emergency access, while still providing separation from local grid, weather, and infrastructure risks tied to a single metro area.
Does IDACORE North charge per rack unit or per cabinet?
No. IDACORE North bills strictly on power draw at $300/kW/month, regardless of whether you're in 1U or a full cabinet. A single 200W server costs $60/month. There's no per-U or per-cabinet space fee — you pay for the electricity your equipment actually uses.
Is pricing at IDACORE North different from IDACORE Boise?
No. Power pricing at $300/kW/month and IP transit pricing are identical between IDACORE North and IDACORE Boise. Only IDACORE East, the megawatt-scale AI/HPC facility in Eastern Oregon, has different pricing structured around $175/kW/month plus utility pass-through.
What compliance certifications apply to a DR deployment at IDACORE North?
IDACORE facilities, including North, hold SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, SSAE-16, and HITRUST CSF certifications, with infrastructure ready for HIPAA, financial, and government compliance workloads. This lets a DR environment meet the same regulatory bar as your production site.
If you're building a DR plan for Spokane and want a facility your team can actually drive to, talk to IDACORE about a Coeur d'Alene cabinet and get power-based pricing that doesn't punish you for keeping standby infrastructure lean.
