Your 'redundant' power is same substation, different breaker

Sorry if this is a dumb question. But I traced the utility feeds for my colo at RackNerd and both "diverse" paths go back to the same Duke substation on Elm Street?

I used the county GIS parcel viewer (free, public record) and followed the easements. There's literally one transformer yard. Two breakers inside it, sure. But same 69kV feed from the same transmission line.

I emailed them and they actually admitted it: "we considered diverse path to Eastside substation but determined cost prohibitive, credit offered for service commitment"

Is this normal? I thought redundant power meant actually separate infrastructure. My professor said always verify but I didn't think I'd catch them this easy...

Should I take the credit? It's $50/month off but I need this for my thesis project and can't have outages!

Back in 2009, I had a cage at a place in Ashburn that did this exact thing. "A and B side" they called it. Both fed from the same Potomac substation, different breakers maybe 30 feet apart. Ice storm took out the whole yard, both sides, 14 hours.

They don't make them like that anymore — wait, no, apparently they absolutely do.

The credit is insulting. $50/month for single point of failure on the entire facility's utility path? That's not a credit, that's hush money. Back in the day we'd have demanded six months free and a real timeline for remediation.

Your GIS work is solid, by the way. Old school traceroute, but for copper.

"we considered it but determined cost prohibitive" is doing SO much heavy lifting here. The "we considered" defense. Classic. With colo marketing vs colo reality. Next you'll find out their "biometric security" is a broken fingerprint reader from 2014 and a guy named Carl who checks IDs sometimes. Take the credit, document everything, post it all when you graduate.

Oh honey, this is frustrating but you're learning the right lesson early! Did you test your restore? (sorry, force of habit — but seriously, for your thesis project, what's the recovery plan?)

The 3-2-1 rule applies to infrastructure awareness too:

• 3 sources of truth: their word, your eyes, public records
• 2 independent verification methods: GIS + physical trace
• 1 offline backup plan: what happens when both breakers trip

That credit is pennies compared to actual diverse utility. For your thesis, can you replicate data to a second provider? Even a small VM at GreenCloudVPS or similar? The $50 won't cover a failed defense.

You're doing great asking these questions now rather than after an outage!

Same thing happened to me in 2019. Different city, same lie.

Wait, they actually admitted it in writing? That's wild

Yeah, I was shocked too. I have the email thread saved in three places now. The exact wording was "we considered diverse path to Eastside substation but determined cost prohibitive, credit offered for service commitment." I didn't even have to push hard — I just asked if they could confirm the two feeds were from different substations and they... answered?

I'm in Ottawa so this is all USD hitting my card worse than it needs to. The $50 credit is against a $89/month 1U colo. Not nothing, but not the point.

This is what surprises me. In Jakarta, vendors will deny until you show them satellite photos. Getting admission in writing is like finding gold. You should archive that email with timestamp, maybe even notarize if your school has free legal clinic.

For my reseller clients I use GreenCloudVPS Tokyo and Singapore. Different power grids, different earthquake zones, different everything. The latency to Indonesia is not amazing but "not amazing" beats "14 hours offline" every time.

Ouch, CAD weakness plus US colo pricing. Double insult.

The Eastside substation they mention — is that even a real Duke Energy facility? I did a quick search and Duke has about seventeen "Eastside" designations across their territory. Without knowing which city your RackNerd is in, hard to say if it was ever a genuine option or just something they named to sound like they tried.

My Ashburn story was at a place that no longer exists, bought by a company that was itself bought. The building still stands. The substation still feeds it. Some things don't change.

Ashburn per the first post, no? RackNerd lists Ashburn as a location — https://www.racknerd.com. Duke Energy territory, makes sense.

I pay $6/year for a RackNerd VPS in Los Angeles. For that price I assume the power comes from a hamster wheel. But colo is different — you're paying for the physical promise, not just the VM.

Has anyone actually mapped other budget colo providers? I'm curious if this is universal at the sub-$100 tier or if RackNerd is especially corner-cutting.