When it comes to data center hosting, there are a ton of articles and blogs floating around online concerning the cost of data center hosting from the point of view of the client. Searching online you can find articles speaking to how much it costs to lease dedicated servers or colocation hardware within a Tier 4 data center and how much the typical colocation provider will charge for their services. While all these articles are good and the server a purpose to illuminate true colocation cost and data center power cost, they never speak to the flip side. They never speak to how much data center hosting truly costs for the provider.
In this article, we are going to talk about that exact topic.
Data Center Power Cost
Data center power costs are a hard thing to pin down. Before even getting into the raw financial estimates of how much it is going to cost to power a data center on a monthly basis (remember, some DC’s use more monthly energy than some small cities), it needs to be stated that data centers need to be powered twice over. Any data center worth their salt, Tier 3 facilities and up, are power redundant. This means all data center equipment is powered by main PDU’s and if they fail, all equipment is powered by auxiliary power units.
Point in case, energy doesn’t come cheap within the world of data centers.
An additional point on data center power costs: Data centers, by their nature, are up and running 24/7/365. If you think about your personal power bill, the reason it as reasonable as it is, is because all of your power isn’t on round the clock. You go to work, you go out and you sleep. During these activities, the power in your home, for the most part is shut off. Not so with DC’s. Data center power cost is so high because they are always connected and on.
Data Center Cooling Cost
Like data center power costs, the true cost of data center cooling comes in two forms: cooling/power and the equipment wear and tear. The first major cost involved in data center cooling technologies come in the form of the actual cooling equipment/running the equipment around the clock. Whereas you might need one or two air conditioners for your home or apartment, for a data center with hundreds of thousands of square feet of floor, the cooling needs for even small Tier 1 facilities are massive. Add to this the fact that cooling equipment needs to stay up and running around the clock and you begin to get a true estimate of how much data center cooling costs.
Data Center Management Team Cost
The other main cost associated with running and operating a data center is the IT team it takes to run that facility on a year round basis. Even if your clients have their own teams to manage their specific IT, colocation and web hosting solutions, to manage a full data center facility is hard, long and expensive work. Beyond the cost of power and cooling, when you factor in the cost of round the clock IT experts, salary, benefits and other employee expenses, the manpower involved with running a high-level tier data center is highly expensive.
On the other side of the coin, while data center hosting is a very expensive business to be in, those costs are passed off the colocation clients. As such, our next article will be on the cost of colocation and data center hosting from the consumer point of view.