The question "rent a server or put our own in a data centre" comes up sooner or later for every company whose hardware has outgrown the office closet. Colocation looks simple: buy a server, ship it, pay for the space. In practice there are plenty of details people discover only after signing. Let's go through them in advance.
Colocation makes sense from two or three owned servers, or when the hardware is specialised enough that nobody rents it out. A single ordinary server is almost always cheaper to rent. The price is made of rack units, kilowatts and bandwidth — and the electricity bill often turns out larger than expected.
What colocation actually is
You buy a server, ship it to a data centre and rent space there. The facility provides the rack, uninterruptible power, cooling, physical security and connectivity to backbone networks. The hardware stays yours: swap the disks, add memory, take it home whenever you like.
The key difference from renting a dedicated server is ownership and control. When renting, you pay to use someone else's hardware and can't, say, install a specific expansion card. With colocation you can do anything — but you're also responsible for everything: a failed disk is your problem and your expense.
Who benefits and who doesn't
The maths is straightforward. Renting a decent dedicated server in Ukraine costs roughly 3000–6000 UAH a month. Hosting your own 1U server runs 600–1500 UAH plus electricity. The saving looks obvious — except you have to buy the server first, and new Xeon-class hardware with disks costs 60–120 thousand UAH.
- One server: renting almost always wins — the purchase takes 2–3 years to pay off, and the hardware ages meanwhile
- Two or three and up: colocation starts to win, especially if the servers are already bought
- Specialised hardware (GPU rigs, particular controllers, hardware keys): colocation is effectively the only option
- Regulatory or internal security requirements of "data only on our own hardware": colocation again
What it costs in Ukraine
The price has three parts, and banners usually show only the first. Rack units are the space: 1U runs about 600–1500 UAH a month depending on the city and the facility's grade. Kyiv sites cost more than regional ones.
The second part is power. Plans typically include 200–300 W per unit, with anything beyond billed separately. A dual-CPU server with a disk array easily draws 400–600 W, and the overage line becomes an unpleasant surprise. The third part is bandwidth: 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps as standard, with wider pipes and extra IPs priced on top.
The most common mistake on a first colocation is counting only the rack-unit price. The real monthly bill comes out 30–50% higher once power and traffic are added.
Ihor Jazov, ranking editor
Autonomy: the main question since 2022
Power used to be a formality. Now it's the first thing to check, and "we have UPS" isn't an answer. Batteries hold the load for minutes — just long enough to hand over to a diesel generator. Without a generator, a prolonged outage simply switches your server off.
What to ask specifically: how many diesel generators there are, how many hours of fuel are stored, whether there's a priority refuelling contract, and how often load tests are run. A good data centre answers with numbers, without pausing. If you get generalities instead, that's an answer in itself.
Second in importance is connectivity. A single backbone provider is a single point of failure. Ask how many independent carriers are brought into the facility and whether the fibre runs along physically separate routes.
What's included and what costs extra
Space, base power, cooling, security and network connectivity are standard. Almost always billed separately: power overage, additional IP addresses, bandwidth upgrades, KVM access for remote management, "remote hands" (an on-site engineer physically touching your server) and storage of spare parts.
Clarify remote hands specifically: how many free requests per month, the price of each additional one, and the hours an engineer is available. If you're 500 kilometres from the site, that detail becomes critical at three in the morning.
How to choose a data centre
Tier level is a useful reference but not a guarantee: many sites claim "Tier III" without actual Uptime Institute certification. So look at specifics rather than badges.
- Power: two independent feeds, N+1 UPS, diesel generators and fuel reserves measured in hours
- Network: 2–3 independent backbone carriers on physically separate routes
- Cooling: redundant air conditioning, temperature and humidity monitoring in the racks
- Access: 24/7 entry for your engineers, video surveillance, visitor logs
- SLA: a concrete availability percentage with real compensation for downtime, not a declaration
And do visit the site before signing. Half an hour on the floor tells you more than any presentation: the state of the racks, how tidy the cabling is, whether access control genuinely works.
What to check in the contract
Three clauses people most often skip. First, termination and hardware removal: how much notice you get and whether accessing your own server will be a problem. Second, liability: who pays to fix an incident caused by the facility. Third, price indexation: whether the site may raise the rate and how much notice it gives.
If you don't own hardware yet, or one server is enough, it's more sensible to start by renting a dedicated server — cheaper upfront and no hardware headaches.
