While it is all too easy these days to find a budget dedicated server, colocation is a different story. For a number of reasons I won’t explore here, cheap colocation providers are hard to come by. You can find an Atom server from a number of providers for around $40 a month, but you’d be hard pressed to find more than one or two reputable colocation facilities offering that price just for the equivalent space.
Remember that depending on your situation, budget colo might leave some things to be desired. It can be a great solution for non mission critical projects, reselling of budget services, or just personal use; but should you need a maintain a solid 99.9% uptime record with guarantees to your customers, you’ll probably want to look into more expensive providers with better facilities, more redundant networking and power equipment, and high quality bandwidth blends.
Here we will explore a couple options for those of you looking for a cheap way to get your servers online.
- FDC Servers
Price wise, FDC Servers is about the cheapest you will find. They have been around for a number of years, and have a number of satisfied customers. Their original facility is in Chicago, but they have recently added a new facility in Denver, where most of their budget services are now available.
At $40 for single 1U server colo with 10mbps unmetered bandwidth and $800 for a full rack with 40 amps and 100mbps unmetered bandwidth their prices are quite competitive to say the least. However they do have their caveats. They are one of the few colo providers to not run their equipment on a UPS, and their facility is not the highest quality. - ColoUnlimited
A somewhat new player in the field, ColoUnlimited offers some incredibly low priced services. They are owned and backed by CoreXchange, a much larger provider, but have only been running under the budget ColoUnlimited brand since late 2010.
Their prices are very competitive, $50 for single 2U and 2 amp server colo with 10mbps unmetered, all the way up to $775 for a full rack with 60 amps of power and 100mbps unmetered bandwidth. However their prices for remote hands are quite a bit higher than FDC and most other budget providers, at $250 per hour during business hours and $150 per hour otherwise. - Burst Net
A well known budget provider of a wide array of web hosting services, Burst Net recently revamped their colo offerings to be somewhat on-par with other budget colo providers. Single server colo starts at $69 for 1U, 1 amp of power, and 5TB of bandwidth. A full rack with 20 amps of power and 10mbps unmetered bandwidth goes for $549.95.
While not as competitive as the others, prices are still good, and Burst Net is a provider with a long history and a good reputation in the hosting industry.
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