We sell colocation and quote it per rack. You will not find market price ranges here; the published ones disagree with each other by a factor of three and none cites a source. What follows is how to make any two quotes comparable.
Published guides to colocation pricing in India give full-rack ranges that contradict each other for the very same providers. Nobody is lying. A rack price with the other four lines missing simply does not mean anything. Here are the five lines, what each one tends to hide, and the question to ask about it.
Space
Sold per U (one rack unit, 44.45 mm), per quarter or half rack, or per full 42U or 47U cabinet. A whole cabinet costs less per U than four quarter racks. Ask whether the cabinet is lockable and yours alone, what depth and weight it takes (some older racks will not accept a modern 1,200 mm chassis), and whether the cabinet, PDUs and cable management are in the price or on separate lines.
Power
The largest number on most quotes and the vaguest. Power is sold three ways. Committed: you pay for a fixed allocation, say 3 kW, used or not. Metered: you pay for what the PDU records, up to a cap. Included: a small allowance is bundled with the space and overage is priced separately.
Ask whether the figure is kW or kVA; they are not the same, and kVA is typically 10 to 20% above usable kW. Ask whether the feeds are A+B, whether UPS and generators are 2N, and what one more kW costs. A quote with cheap space and dear power can cost double a quote with the opposite for the same servers, and you will not see it until the second month.
Bandwidth
Either a committed rate (say 100 Mbps, bursting to port speed, billed at the 95th percentile) or a port with a monthly allowance (say 1 Gbps, 10 TB included). Ask which, what overage costs, whether DDoS protection is in the path and whether it is extra, whose IP space you are using, and who operates the network. A facility's house network and a tenant's own backbone are different things.
In our cage the network is ours: a 10 Gbps core, our DDoS scrubbing, our IP space, a 1 Gbps port per server with 10 Gbps available.
Cross-connects
A fibre to a carrier, a cloud on-ramp or another tenant in the building is a cross-connect, normally a one-time installation plus a monthly fee per pair. Facilities differ enormously here. Get the installation and monthly figures before you need one.
Remote hands
Someone has to reboot the box, swap a disk or reseat a cable when you are not in the building. Ask who does it, the facility's smart-hands desk or the provider's own engineers; what is included each month and the hourly rate beyond it; and the response time, day and night.
Ours is URLStart engineers with console and IPMI access to your servers, plus the facility's smart hands for anything physical, around the clock.
Not on the quote, and should be
The Tier classification of the building and who runs it. Our Noida cage is in a Tier IV facility operated by Yotta, and we also colocate in Mumbai; everything inside the cages is run by URLStart. The access rules: notice required, and whether you can bring hardware the same day. Migration: will they rack, cable and power your hardware, and for how much (we do it the day it arrives). The contract term, the notice period, and what happens to your hardware if you leave.
Comparing two quotes
Put the five lines in a table. Fill each cell from both quotes and write "unknown" wherever a quote is silent. Send the unknowns back and ask for them in writing. In my experience the cheaper headline is the one with more unknowns. When both columns are complete, add them up at your realistic power draw and bandwidth, and compare totals.
Questions we get asked
Why don't you publish a rack price? Because the other four lines move the total more than the space does. We quote all five together, in writing, for your actual hardware.
Is colocation cheaper than renting dedicated servers? Over three years, for ten or more servers you already own, usually. For one or two, a dedicated server is simpler. The colocation against dedicated comparison draws the line.
Can I bring a single server? Yes, from 1U.
Is DDoS protection extra on colocated servers? No. It is in the path on our network.
How fast can I move in? Deliveries are racked and powered the day they arrive, by appointment.
