Flexential pricing

Colocation is simple at heart: the servers are yours, and what you pay for is room, electricity and cooling in a facility that someone else manages. Flexential runs at least 40 data centers spread over 18 markets, and more than 360 network carriers are already on hand (source).

Starting small is fine: one rack is enough to begin, and you can stay with the same company as you grow into the multi-megawatt range. Its high density cabinets, too, are built to handle 150 kW apiece or beyond (source). One customer quote on Flexential's own site describes the company as NVIDIA DGX-Ready, a label worth knowing about if that kind of hardware is in your plans.

A rack is a metal frame, roughly person-height, with 42 slots for servers. A full rack fills every slot. Every package includes a little electricity with it, counted in kW. That number is just how much power your gear is pulling at a given moment.

Working servers in a rack usually draw well beyond 2.4 kW, and each kW above the included amount is charged at your city's market rate. That is why power, not the frame, ends up as the biggest line on the bill once a rack is full.

<details> <summary>How we put the estimates together</summary>

Take the package list price first. Figure out how many kW you'll need past what the package covers, then price each of those kW at the asking rent in your market, from CBRE's report. Add the two figures for a monthly estimate. CBRE quotes its rents on deals of at least 250 kW, so here those rates do duty for the price of extra power on a single rack. Vendr has also looked at Equinix, and found it billing an extra $150 to $300 per kW a month on top of a cabinet's allowance, a figure that fits the same range.

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Asking rent is the going rate providers in a given city charge for each kW, and vacancy measures how much of the room is standing empty. When vacancy is low, say 0.2% in Portland, there's not much room to negotiate, while 16.8% in Minneapolis means more options. Every rent and vacancy figure below comes from CBRE.

Add it up and a whole rack drawing between 5 and 10 kW around Dallas-Fort Worth comes to roughly $1,350–$2,410 monthly, whereas in Charlotte the same setup would be somewhere around $1,420–$2,790. Need something bigger, say a 100 to 250 kW cage? Denver would run you roughly $15,500–$43,750 per month, and the Charlotte-Raleigh area roughly $19,000–$58,750.

PeeringDB counts 36 Flexential locations spread across 15 cities, and a single listing can stand for a campus with several buildings. Salt Lake City leads with 6. Portland and Denver each have 4, and Dallas, Atlanta, Las Vegas and Nashville each have 3. Tampa and Charlotte have 2 apiece, and one apiece belongs to Phoenix, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Raleigh and Richmond.

An internet exchange works like a shared switch inside a building, letting networks swap traffic with each other directly, so a site that has one gives you more ways to connect. Salt Lake City/Downtown (SLC04) is Flexential's best wired location, hosting 25 networks along with 3 internet exchanges. Behind it sit Portland/Hillsboro 2 (PDX02), home to 23 networks plus a single exchange, and Denver/Aurora (DEN03), carrying 15 networks plus 2 exchanges.