Eight questions every buyer should ask a colocation provider before signing a contract or shipping hardware — with the red flags that tell you to keep shopping.
Most people approach choosing a data center the wrong way — they look at the price per U and stop there. The monthly rate is just the starting point. What you're really evaluating is the total cost of ownership, the operational reliability, and whether the support model works for how your team actually operates.
These eight questions will surface most of what you need to know about any colocation provider before you commit.
The listed rack rate is not your total bill. You need to ask specifically about egress fees, remote hands billing, additional IP costs, power overages, and any recurring fees beyond the base rate. Get a worst-case estimate at your expected bandwidth and usage level.
There's a meaningful difference between a data center that owns its fiber infrastructure and one that resells connectivity from a third-party carrier. ISP-operated facilities (where the data center is run by or tightly integrated with the ISP owning the fiber) tend to have shorter latency paths, better pricing, and fewer dependencies in their network stack.
At Columbia Colocation, Crescent Bar Internet operates both the colocation facility and the Grant County PUD fiber network your hardware connects to. There is no third-party ISP in the path.
Power is the most common cause of unplanned colocation downtime. Understand the difference between single-feed power (one utility feed, UPS for short outages, generator for extended outages) and redundant/dual-feed power (two independent utility feeds, each capable of running the full load). Tier 3 and Tier 4 facilities have true redundancy. Smaller and regional facilities typically have single-feed with UPS.
The right answer depends on your workload's sensitivity. For most SMB and homelab workloads, single-feed with UPS on a reliable grid (like Grant County PUD, which has delivered clean power for 2+ years with no outages) is entirely acceptable. For mission-critical, 99.999% SLA requirements, you need dual-feed.
Remote hands is when a facility technician physically interacts with your hardware — rebooting a hung server, swapping a failed drive, checking a cable connection, or receiving a delivery. At large enterprise facilities, remote hands is often billed at $75–$150/hr with a 1-hour minimum. At smaller, locally-operated facilities, it's often included in the monthly rate.
Ask specifically: How quickly can you respond to a remote hands request? Who physically handles it? Is there a charge? Is there a response time commitment?
Month-to-month contracts cost more per month but protect you if the provider underperforms, if your needs change, or if you find a better option. Annual or multi-year contracts provide pricing stability but create lock-in. Understand what the early termination fee is, and whether there are automatic renewals that require notice to cancel.
Run a traceroute from the facility to your primary user locations before signing up. Ask for a test server or IP you can ping. Published latency numbers from the provider are marketing — your own measurement is ground truth.
For Seattle-area users: a Quincy, WA facility will typically show 10–20ms round-trip. A Seattle-area facility will show under 5ms. For most web applications, databases, and game servers, the difference between 5ms and 15ms is imperceptible to end users. The cost difference between Seattle and Quincy pricing is very much perceptible.
Ask for documented uptime history — ideally 12–24 months of incident logs. Small facilities without formal SLAs may not have this in a polished format, but any legitimate provider should be able to tell you about significant outages and what caused them. "No outages in X years" should come with a brief explanation of the power and network architecture that makes that possible.
This is the question most buyers forget to ask until something breaks at 2am. Does the provider have a real phone number? Does a human answer it? Is there a NOC with 24/7 monitoring, or is it a small team with business hours? Neither is inherently wrong — but you need to know what you're getting before your server is down and you can't reach anyone.
We're not going to pretend we're a hyperscale Tier 4 facility. Here's the honest answer to each question for Columbia Colocation:
The things we don't have yet: formal SLA, 24/7 NOC, dual-feed power, generator live (in progress). If those are hard requirements for your workload today, be direct with us and we'll tell you honestly whether we're the right fit.
Ask us any of these questions directly. 509-906-1250 or [email protected] — we answer both.