PhoenixNAP. Was cheap, not so much now. They have a Mesa location that is still $85 for 1U but you are on a shared 20A circuit and they will yell at you if you pull over 3A sustained. My E3 idles at 1.9A so I was nervous every summer.
I am looking at Joe's Datacenter in Kansas City now. $65 for 1U, 2A included, Cogent + HE. Anyone used them?
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This is what I meant by operational perspective. Hetzner's power-capped plans work differently: you choose a draw limit at contract start, 1kW, 2kW, 3kW, etc. The base price includes that draw. If you exceed it, they do not shut you off, but you pay the overage at their blended rate. It removes the old "20A circuit, use what you want" flexibility but it also removes the surprise.
Their RECs are from Nordic hydro and they have published the certificates since 2019. No separate fee, it is in the per-kWh rate.
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Montreal is still reasonable. I have 6U at a local place in Pointe-Claire, $185 CAD per U per month all-in, power to 3kW per U if you can cool it. That is about $135 USD at today's rate.
The Quebec hydro advantage is real. Commercial rates here are around $0.05/kWh. I have clients in Toronto paying more for AWS egress than I pay for physical rack space.
Downside: you are in Montreal. If you need to touch hardware, you are in Montreal.
And there it is. The death of burstable power. Twenty years ago I could spike to 80% of my breaker capacity for an hour and nobody cared. Now they want to average you down to a line item.
The AI squeeze is real too. I know a guy who runs a twelve-rack facility in Columbus. He had three legacy customers on 5-year deals at $250/U. All three are out at renewal because he subdivided their racks into 10kW AI nodes at $800/U. He literally could not afford not to.
Legacy workload surcharge is coming. I will bet my last R710 on it.
I should complete this. At 34% hike with 6% discount rate, the NPV break-even on a 5-year lock versus annual renewal is approximately 18 months if you assume 10% annual hikes continue. If hikes moderate to 5%, break-even stretches to 28 months.
The risk is provider insolvency or acquisition. We had a 3-year lock with a Dallas facility that got bought by StackPath in 2019. New owner honored the rate but moved us to a worse network blend six months in. Contract said "or equivalent," and they decided Cogent plus Telia was equivalent to HE plus Zayo. Took six months to litigate.
Lock if you trust the operator. That is the hard part.
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I know two people who used them. Both said fine for price, both left because remote hands response time was 4-6 hours minimum. If you never need a drive swapped, great. If you run ZFS and care about resilver windows, not great.
Also their blended bandwidth is HE-heavy. Fine for North America, painful to Asia.
I am still buying used storage servers. The 6049P-E1CR36L at $1,400 is the sweet spot right now. I just picked up a 6049P-E1CR60L, 60 bays, for $2,200. That is 5U but 60x 16TB is 960TB raw. At your new colo rate Carl, the server pays for itself in 5 months versus renting that capacity from Backblaze B2.
