Colocation

Floor space is the easy part to compare, so start with the rest. The rack is plugged into a network we run, on transit we aggregate rather than resell from one carrier, and it sits beside your cloud instances and your bare metal servers with no public hop between them. Power and cooling are inside the availability we commit to by contract, so they are something we owe you. Remote hands is our own engineers. And there is one contract and one operations team for the whole estate, instead of a landlord, a carrier and a cloud provider each explaining that it is one of the others.

A third of a rack, two thirds of a rack, or a full rack. They are thirds, not the quarters and halves most of the market quotes, so compare on what you get rather than on the fraction.

Up to 20 kW, where the site supports it. The figure is a property of the facility your rack is in, not of the product, so ask us for the site you are buying in before you order dense hardware. Two conditions hold everywhere. Your equipment has to be dual-corded and draw on both feeds, because a single-corded server sits outside what we can commit to on power. And its real draw has to stay under 80% of the rack's power connection.

We hold 27°C with a permissible deviation of 5 degrees either way, measured 50cm from the rack, at a height of one metre, inside the cold aisle. Where you measure is part of the number: put a probe in the hot aisle and you will read something else, correctly. Racks sit in contained rows with doors and aisle ceilings, airflow runs front to back, and every empty U carries a blanking plate, which we require rather than recommend. We hold relative humidity between 35% and 65%, mostly to keep static under control.

Yes, to any carrier present in the building, on your own contract with them. That circuit does not pass through our network and we do not sit in it. Most racks take our transit instead. We aggregate the transit providers available to us rather than reselling one carrier, we sit directly on the major European internet exchanges, and we peer with AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle and Cloudflare, so the route to a given destination is usually the aggregate rather than one provider's view of it. Either way it is your choice, and you can run both.

All four: Madrid, Amsterdam, Munich and Helsinki, and a rack in any of them sits on the same network as the other three. Space at short notice is a narrower answer, and today that is Madrid and Amsterdam.

If you have a full rack, your own people hold the credentials and the access is 24x7. If you have a third or two thirds of a rack, access is escorted and no badge is issued, because the rest of that rack belongs to somebody else and handing out unescorted credentials would expose them.

Yes. Remote hands is our own engineers doing the thing you would otherwise drive there to do: a reseat, a swap, a cable, eyes on a front panel. On the advanced support plan it is a prepaid bag of hours that is already set up, so there is nothing to negotiate at two in the morning. On the free support baseline it is billed by the hour. We do not publish rates on the site, so ask and you will get the number.

99.9% availability, by contract, with automatic credits if we miss it. On this product it covers the service, the power and the cooling, so keeping your rack fed and in its thermal envelope is a commitment we owe you. Where it stops is at what you deploy inside the rack. Your hardware, your operating systems and your applications are yours, and the power side of the commitment assumes your equipment is drawing on both feeds.

Nothing you should notice, provided your equipment is drawing on both. Every rack takes independent no-break feeds backed by UPS and generators, and at some sites that is three separate paths instead of the usual two. A single-corded server defeats all of it on its own, which is why we ask about cording before you ship.

Our datacenters are independently audited, not self-assessed, and the certificates belong to the buildings rather than to us. On this page that distinction matters, because the building is what you are buying. Scope and audit dates differ by site, and so does the physical envelope: the feed topology, the containment and the thermal numbers are all written into the technical dossier for the site you are in. Ask for that dossier before you assume a scheme or a figure covers the room your rack will be in. A certificate without its scope statement is decoration, and the scope is the part an auditor reads.

In Madrid and Amsterdam, at short notice. In Munich and Helsinki the answer is a lead time we give on request rather than one we would quote on a web page, because it depends on how much space you need. Ask and you get a real one, before you plan a migration around a site rather than after.

Twelve months minimum, and it renews tacitly for twelve more unless you give notice. Notice is three months before the end of the period, which is not the same as three months from whenever you ask: miss the window and you are in for another year. That is standard in this industry, and you should have it now rather than in month thirteen. Put the date in a calendar when you sign.

We do not publish rates, for this or for anything else we sell. What moves the number is the size, the power you actually draw, whether you take our transit or bring your own carrier, and how much remote hands you expect to use. Tell us those four things and an engineer comes back with a price, normally in under 24 hours, along with what it does and does not include. No sales sequence attached to it.

We can, under European law, on a European order. Your own access to the rack is arranged through us, and on a shared rack there is no unescorted route to it at all.

The US CLOUD Act lets American authorities compel any provider under US jurisdiction to hand over data in its possession, custody or control, wherever it is held, without notifying you. Colocation looks like it escapes that, because the disks are yours and they are in Europe. What does not escape it is any company in the chain under US jurisdiction, or a subsidiary of one, that can reach the room, the network, or the records of who comes in and what is installed. Neither DIVERSITY nor the operator of any of our buildings is owned or controlled by a US company, so there is no entity above us for such an order to be served on.

No. We do not hold credentials to your hardware and there is no console we log into on your behalf, which is the structural difference between colocation and a managed service. What we control is the space, the power, the cooling, the network your rack is plugged into and who walks into the room. If you want us able to do more than that, you say so and we agree it in writing first.