Ok,
Something along my question was brought up a few months back but I can't remember it exactly and I think the posts strayed off-topic. My question is this, why are colocation prices generally more expensive than dedicated prices? With the dedicated your paying for the server rent and for bandwidth; however, with colocation your just paying for rack space (even though its sometimes free) and bandwidth. So, wouldn't it be more logical for colocation to cost much less since I would be providing my own server? I can understand having the prices cost a bit more than dedicated because they have to make money off the bandwidth since that would be the only income. However, in my eyes it seems more economical to buy a dedicated because you can upgrade to a newer server in the future if you ever need too. Seems easier to do that than to buy a newer server and colocate it. Am I making sense here, or am I missing something?

Generally, when you purchase colo rack and bw in bulk, you get it relatively cheap. You can find rack space anywhere from $10-$30/U (with power) and bw anywhere from $0.50/gb-$1.50/gb. Those are the averages I've encountered -- there are cheaper colo facilities as well as more expensive facilities.

Most places I've seen it costs more to colo with than to go dedicated.

Just an assumption, but most people you buy cheap dedicated server's from are reselling them. They don't have thier own facilities and therefor don't have alot of flexability. Plus it's tough for them to have you ship them them the server and turn around and ship it out to a colo facility. Not to mention the liability they incur.

The people you see colocation prices from have thier own facilities and larger costs. Compare colo prices with the colo providers own dedicated servers. You'll find a difference then.

Aaron

Greetings:

Co-location tends to be less than renting servers (dedicated) when you have servers to make the most of a rack, and the minimum bandwidth requirement (if any) that the co-location provider has in place.

Also, some of the very cheap dedicated server providers use Cogent (very cheap -- get what you pay for bandwidth); and most of the solid co-location providers will use higher quality bandwidth that ends up costing more for them, and their customers.

If you have less than 1/4th of a rack of servers, it often gets hard to cost justify everything.

Everything meaning spare parts, virtual hands on or otherwise people to physically maintain the equipment, insurance on the equipment, etc.

Thank you.

Hi sir,

If you had less than 320 GB/month (<1MB at 95 % percentile)
you probably had better to use dedicated server because you don't need to buy a server.

If you had more you had better to use collocation.

<<Admin edit: removed promotion bit>>

I just switched from dedicated to colocation. It cost me a few grand up front for servers but my monthly fee got cut by 33%. I suggest colocation for people who need more than 5 servers or more than 1 Terabyte per month of bandwidth.