Colocation vs cloud: 3-year TCO for a 42U deployment

A cloud spreadsheet is honest about vCPU and egress in year one. It is quiet about three years of reserved-instance regret, idle capacity you already paid for, and the staff who now babysit twenty accounts. A 42U footprint flips that: capex and remote-hands dominate, and the incremental VM becomes almost free.

We do not publish cabinet prices. Power, cross-connects and remote hands are facility-specific and written on the quote. This article is the shape of the model, not a Sofia or Istanbul rate card. For space options see colocation.

Cost buckets that actually move

Over 36 months, finance should see at least:

1. Space and power. kW, not just U. A half-empty 42U with a 2 kW limit is not cheaper than 10 U at 5 kW if the workload is power-bound.
2. Network. Cross-connects, transit or on-net BGP, extra IPv4. Cloud hides this in egress; colo shows it as a line item — which is a feature.
3. Hardware refresh. Year 0 buy versus year 3 residual. Cloud never shows residual because you never owned the disk.
4. People. Remote hands versus a cloud ticket queue. Colo is cheaper only if someone already owns the hardware lifecycle.
5. Idle. Cloud bills the SKU you forgot. Colo bills the cabinet you already stood up.

The crossover is not a universal month-18. It is “when the estate is dense enough that unused cloud margin exceeds unused U.”

When we tell people to stay on cloud

Stay on public cloud or a few dedicated SKUs if the footprint is a handful of machines, the team is two people, or you must delete the estate in a quarter. Colo is an operations decision first.

When 42U is the cheaper honesty

Studios, ISPs and SaaS firms that already buy servers, already have a network engineer, and already know their 95th-percentile power should request a cabinet — not a VM calculator. Dual-site and remote hands are scoped on that same quote. There is no public “€ / U” on this site because it would be wrong for at least one of Istanbul, Sofia, Dublin or Karachi.

Bring a power budget, a U count and whether you need BGP. We will return a facility-specific number. That is the TCO conversation; a homepage slider is not.