If your production infrastructure sits in Spokane or on the Pacific Coast, your DR plan needs a site on a different grid, outside the same seismic and wildfire risk zone, close enough for real recovery drills. IDACORE North in Coeur d'Alene — 45 minutes from Spokane — is open for active orders now, billed at $300/kW/month with no power commitment minimum.
Why Does Distance From Spokane Matter for DR?
Most DR plans I've reviewed over the years fail the same test: they put the backup site too close to share the same risk, or too far to actually use during an incident. Put your DR site in the same building, same utility feed, same regional substation as production, and you haven't built redundancy — you've built a second copy of the same single point of failure.
Coeur d'Alene solves both problems at once. It's close enough to Spokane — about 45 minutes by I-90 — that your team can drive there for a failover test on a Tuesday afternoon, not treat it as a quarterly fire drill requiring flights and hotel rooms. But it's far enough, and on a different power grid, that a Spokane-area outage, a Washington wildfire event, or a Cascadia-adjacent seismic incident on the coast doesn't touch your Idaho infrastructure.
I've talked to enough Spokane IT directors who treat "DR" as a line item in a compliance document rather than a plan anyone has tested. That's the gap IDACORE North closes. You get a facility close enough to be operationally real.
What Does "Different Grid" Actually Mean Here?
Idaho Power serves North Idaho and Boise independently of the Washington grid serving Spokane and the greater Puget Sound area. Idaho's commercial power rates run around $0.055/kWh — roughly half the national average — which matters not just for your colocation bill but for the broader argument that Idaho is structurally cheaper and more stable ground to build on. A grid-level event affecting Washington utilities doesn't cascade into Idaho Power's territory. That's a real, physical separation — not a marketing phrase.
How Does Per-U Colocation Work for a DR Footprint?
Most DR deployments don't need a quarter rack. You need two or three servers running replication, maybe a Veeam repository, maybe a warm standby database node — and most colocation providers will tell you the minimum is a half cabinet whether you need it or not.
IDACORE North rents by the U. One U minimum, no rack space billing. You're billed $300/kW/month on the power your equipment actually draws, not a flat fee for the space it occupies. A single 200W backup server costs $60/month in power (0.2 kW x $300). A 3-server DR cluster pulling 600W runs $180/month. That's the whole bill — no hidden rack tax, no "minimum footprint" upsell.
This matters specifically for DR because DR capacity planning is usually wrong in one direction or the other. You either overprovision because you're paying for a cabinet anyway, or you underprovision because a half-rack minimum doesn't fit the budget. Billing on power lets you size the DR environment to the actual recovery workload, not to a provider's space tiers.
What a Real Spokane DR Deployment Looks Like
Take a mid-sized Spokane healthcare SaaS company running production in a Seattle-area colo. Their compliance requirement: a geographically separate DR site with data residency controls, able to fail over within an RTO of 4 hours. Previously they ran DR in a California data center — different seismic zone from Seattle on paper, but a six-hour flight-and-drive scenario if their ops lead needed physical access during an incident.
Moving DR to IDACORE North: 45 minutes from their Spokane office instead of a flight. Idaho data residency instead of a third state in the mix. A 4U replication cluster drawing 800W costs $240/month in power, plus a 1G IP transit commit at $600/month for replication traffic over committed bandwidth with 95th percentile billing. Total colocation and transit spend: under $900/month for a DR footprint that used to require remote hands contracts and per-incident travel budgets.
Transit That's Actually Ours, Not Resold
Every DR site is only as good as its network path. IDACORE runs IP transit on our own ASN with our own BGP peering — not a reseller arrangement bolted onto a colo contract. That background comes from running an ISP with Seattle Internet Exchange peering for years before IDACORE existed. Routing decisions during a failover event are something we actively manage, not something we outsource to a carrier's NOC queue three states away.
Transit at IDACORE North is priced identically to Boise, by committed bandwidth, 95th percentile billing:
| Commit | Monthly Price | Per-Mbps |
|---|---|---|
| 100M | $170 | $1.70 |
| 1G | $600 | $0.60 |
| 10G | $2,000 | $0.20 |
| 100G | $11,050 | $0.111 |
For DR replication traffic, that flat, predictable pricing matters more than people expect. You know your replication bandwidth need in advance — it's your change rate, not an unpredictable customer-facing load — so you can commit to the right tier and never see a surprise overage.
How Does Coeur d'Alene Compare to Keeping DR on the Coast?
| Factor | Coast-to-Coast DR (e.g., Seattle to CA colo) | IDACORE North (Spokane to Coeur d'Alene) |
|---|---|---|
| Drive time for physical access | 10+ hours or a flight | ~45 minutes |
| Grid independence from production | Partial — same Western Interconnection risk profile | Separate Idaho Power grid |
| Data residency | Often crosses state lines | Stays in Idaho |
| Minimum footprint | Typically half or full cabinet | 1U minimum, billed on power |
| Contract term | Often 36 months | 12-month standard |
The seismic and wildfire separation gets most of the attention in DR planning conversations, and it's real — North Idaho sits outside the Pacific Coast risk zones that drive a lot of DR site selection in the first place. But the operational distance matters just as much. A DR site your team can actually drive to and test against quarterly gets used. One that requires a flight gets tested once during the sales cycle and never again.
Frequently Asked Questions
How far is IDACORE North from Spokane?
IDACORE North, at 2115 N Government Way in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, is approximately 45 minutes from Spokane by car. That distance is close enough for routine failover testing and physical access during an incident, while still placing your DR infrastructure on a separate Idaho Power grid, outside Washington's utility footprint.
Is IDACORE North on the same power grid as Spokane?
No. IDACORE North is served by Idaho Power, which operates independently of the Washington utilities serving Spokane and the greater Puget Sound region. That separation means a grid-level event affecting Washington doesn't directly propagate into North Idaho's power supply — a core requirement for genuine disaster recovery site selection.
What's the minimum colocation footprint at IDACORE North?
One rack unit (1U), with no power commitment minimum. You're billed $300/kW/month based on actual power draw, not rack space. A single 200W server costs $60/month. There's no half-cabinet or full-cabinet minimum forcing you to overprovision a DR footprint you don't need yet.
Does IDACORE North offer the same IP transit as Boise?
Yes. IP transit pricing is identical across IDACORE Boise and IDACORE North: $170/month for 100M, $600/month for 1G, $2,000/month for 10G, and $11,050/month for 100G, all committed-bandwidth, 95th percentile billing on our own ASN with direct BGP peering.
What contract term does IDACORE North require?
IDACORE North offers 12-month standard terms, compared to the 36-month terms common among enterprise colocation providers. That shorter commitment matters for DR deployments, where requirements shift as your production environment and compliance obligations change.
If your DR plan still depends on a flight to reach your failover site, it's time to rethink the geography. Talk to IDACORE North about sizing a Coeur d'Alene DR footprint to your actual recovery workload at https://idacore.com/contact.
