If you run production in Seattle or Portland and your DR site is a second Seattle lease, you don't have DR — you have the same earthquake fault, the same wildfire smoke, the same grid under the same stress. IDACORE North in Coeur d'Alene sits 45 minutes from Spokane, on different geology, different power grid, different everything. Per-U colocation, billed on power at $300/kW/month, open for orders today.
Why Does "Disaster Recovery" Fail When Both Sites Are on the I-5 Corridor?
Most Seattle companies I talk to think they have DR because they've got a second lease somewhere. Then you ask where, and it's Tacoma. Or Kent. Or another building fifteen miles down the same fault line, on the same power infrastructure, in the same wildfire smoke pattern every August.
That's not disaster recovery. That's the same risk profile with extra rent.
Real DR means geographic separation that actually changes your exposure. Different seismic zone. Different grid. Different climate risk. Coeur d'Alene gives you that without pushing your latency into the stratosphere — you're not failing over to Denver or Dallas and eating 40ms+ round trips. You're 45 minutes from Spokane and still inside the Pacific Northwest.
I've run infrastructure in this region for three decades, including an ISP with our own ASN peering at the Seattle Internet Exchange. I've watched companies find out the hard way that "backup site" and "different fault line" aren't the same thing. Usually during an actual incident, which is the worst possible time to learn it.
What Does Spokane Market Proximity Actually Buy You?
A 45-minute drive matters more than it sounds like on paper. If you need hands-on remediation — swapping a drive, reseating a card, walking a vendor through a physical install — you want someone who can be there same-day, not someone flying in from a NOC three states away.
It also matters for your Spokane-based customers or offices. If your primary audience sits in eastern Washington or the Idaho panhandle, Coeur d'Alene isn't just a DR site — it's lower latency for day-to-day production traffic too. You don't have to choose between "disaster recovery location" and "good place to actually serve customers from."
How Does IDACORE North Pricing Compare to a Second Seattle Lease?
Power pricing at North is identical to our Boise facility: $300/kW/month, billed on actual power draw, not rack space. A 300W DR server costs $90/month in power. There's no minimum power commitment and 1U is the smallest space you can rent — which matters a lot for DR, where you often need a lean standby footprint, not a full cabinet sitting mostly idle.
Compare that to what a second Seattle-area lease typically runs. Market colocation in Seattle commonly bills per-U or per-cabinet with monthly minimums regardless of what you're actually drawing in power — you're often paying for space you don't need just to have a presence. IDACORE North flips that: you pay for the power your DR gear actually uses.
| Factor | IDACORE North (Coeur d'Alene) | Typical Second Seattle Site |
|---|---|---|
| Billing model | $300/kW/month, power draw | Per-U/per-cabinet, often with minimums |
| Minimum footprint | 1U, no power minimum | Often fractional cabinet minimum |
| Seismic/wildfire exposure | Separate from I-5 corridor | Same corridor as primary |
| Distance from Spokane | ~45 minutes | N/A |
| Contract term | 12-month standard | Often 36-month enterprise terms |
Idaho Power's commercial rate runs around $0.055/kWh — roughly half the national average — which is part of why we can hold that $300/kW/month rate without the creeping add-ons you see from providers passing through West Coast power costs.
What About Network Connectivity for Failover?
DR only works if traffic actually fails over cleanly. IP transit at North is priced the same as everywhere else in our footprint — committed bandwidth, 95th percentile billing, no surprise egress charges when your DR site suddenly takes production load during an incident. A 1G commit runs $600/month ($0.60/Mbps); 10G runs $2,000/month ($0.20/Mbps).
That's the thing nobody tells you about cloud-based DR: egress billing is unpredictable exactly when you need it to be predictable. The month you actually fail over is the month AWS hands you the biggest bill you've seen all year, because egress scales with the disaster, not with your budget. Flat per-Mbps transit from our own ASN doesn't do that. We run our own BGP, we built our peering relationships ourselves at the Seattle Internet Exchange — this isn't resold transit with a markup bolted on.
What Does a Real DR Setup at North Look Like?
Take a 12-server production environment in Seattle — say, averaging 250W per server, 3kW total. A lean DR posture at North doesn't mean replicating all 12 servers at full idle. Most teams run 3-4 standby nodes (replication targets, a jump box, maybe a lightweight app tier) sized to absorb failover traffic until they can scale up post-incident.
Four servers at 300W each is 1.2kW — $360/month in power. Add a 1G transit commit at $600/month and you're running a functional DR posture for under $1,000/month, with enough headroom to scale that environment up fast if Seattle actually goes down. Try finding that economics in a hyperscaler DR region, where idle standby capacity still accrues storage and networking charges that add up fast even when nothing is happening.
Frequently Asked Questions
How far is Coeur d'Alene from Spokane for DR purposes?
IDACORE North, located at 2115 N Government Way in Coeur d'Alene, is approximately 45 minutes from Spokane by road. That's close enough for same-day hands-on support and low-latency failover, but far enough to sit on different seismic and grid infrastructure than the Pacific Coast.
Is IDACORE North billed the same as IDACORE Boise?
Yes. Power is billed at $300/kW/month at both facilities, based on actual draw rather than rack space, with no power minimum and 1U as the smallest available footprint. IP transit pricing is also identical across both locations: 100M at $170/mo, 1G at $600/mo, 10G at $2,000/mo, 100G at $11,050/mo.
Can I colocate a single server at IDACORE North for DR?
Yes. IDACORE North rents space down to a single rack unit, with no minimum power commitment. You're billed for the power that server actually draws — a 300W DR server runs $90/month — not a flat fee for the U it occupies.
Why is Coeur d'Alene better than a second data center in Seattle or Portland for disaster recovery?
A second Seattle or Portland facility often sits on the same seismic fault, same wildfire risk zone, and same regional grid as your primary site — which defeats the purpose of DR. Coeur d'Alene provides genuine geographic separation while staying inside the Pacific Northwest, keeping latency low for failover and ongoing operations.
What contract term does IDACORE North require?
IDACORE North uses 12-month standard terms, compared to the 36-month terms common among enterprise colocation providers. That shorter commitment matters for DR deployments, where you may want to scale capacity up or down as your primary environment and recovery requirements change.
If your current DR plan is a second lease on the same fault line, it's time to actually fix that — contact IDACORE and get a Coeur d'Alene footprint stood up on 12-month terms, billed on the power you draw, not the rack space you're renting.
