How to Ship a Server to a Colocation Facility (What to Expect)If you’ve never used colocation before, one of the biggest unknowns is surprisingly simple:

“Okay… but how do I actually get my server there?” Well, if you’re local to us in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, most of this doesn’t apply. But we support small businesses nationwide (and beyond.) So this article is for everyone else. 

The good news: shipping a server to a colocation facility isn’t complicated—and you’re not expected to figure it out alone.

At Colo By The U, we walk customers through the entire process, from prep to power-on. Here’s what that typically looks like.

Step 1: Planning Before Anything Ships

Before a server ever leaves your office, we start with a short conversation.

We’ll confirm:

• What hardware you’re sending and the dimensions. 

• Power requirements

• Network needs

This step matters because it prevents surprises on delivery day—and ensures everything is ready when your equipment arrives.

Step 2: Packing and Shipping (Keep It Simple)

Most customers ship their servers using standard carriers like UPS or FedEx. We’re able to recieve both,  As long as the hardware is packed securely (original packaging is ideal, but not required), the process is straightforward.

We’ll provide clear instructions on:

• Labeling

• Timing

• What information to include

• Who needs the tracking info.

No worries about package theft, no guesswork, and no sending equipment into a black hole.

When your server arrives at our office, our team:

• Receives the shipment

• Confirms the equipment

• Coordinates next steps with you. Typically, this means an email or phone call to let you know that your server is on the way to the colocation facility. 

You’ll know when it arrives, and you’ll know what happens next.

Step 4: Rack, Power, and Network

Once everything is confirmed:

• Your server is installed in the rack

• Power is connected

• Network is provisioned

If you need help with configuration or troubleshooting, this is where our hands-on support really shines. You’re not opening tickets into the void—you’re talking to people who can physically see your hardware.

Step 5: You’re Live (and Supported)

After your server is online, you’re in control. But you’re not on your own.

Whether you need a reboot, a cable check, or help planning your next piece of hardware, we’re here. Many of our customers choose colocation specifically because they want a human-scale data center experience, not a self-service portal and a knowledge base article.

Shipping a Server Doesn’t Have to Be Stressful

If you’ve been hesitant about colocation because the logistics felt intimidating, you’re not alone. Most first-time customers feel that way.

Our job is to make shipping a server to a colocation facility feel routine—because for us, it is.

If you’re considering colocation and want to talk through what the process would look like for your setup, reach out. We’re happy to walk you through it before anything ships.

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If you’ve been researching colocation or data centers, you’ve probably seen the term 2N redundancy come up a lot.

It sounds reassuring. It also sounds vague.

So let’s break it down in plain language—and explain why it matters for your uptime.

First: What Is 2N Redundancy?

At its simplest, 2N redundancy means everything critical has a complete backup.

If your server needs:

• Power

• Cooling

• Network connectivity

Then a 2N design provides two fully independent systems, each capable of handling 100% of the load on its own.

Not “extra capacity.”
Not “most of the way covered.”
A full duplicate.

If one system fails or is taken offline for maintenance, the other keeps running without interruption.

Why Redundancy Matters More Than Raw Uptime Numbers

Many providers advertise uptime percentages—99.9%, 99.99%, and so on. But those numbers don’t tell you how that uptime is achieved.

Redundancy is what makes those numbers realistic.

Without redundancy:

• Maintenance requires downtime

• Single points of failure can cascade

• Small issues turn into outages

With 2N redundancy:

• Maintenance can happen without disruption

• Failures stay isolated

• Systems remain stable even when components fail

In other words, redundancy turns problems into non-events.

What 2N Redundancy Looks Like in Practice

In a properly designed data center, 2N redundancy applies to critical infrastructure such as:

• Power feeds

• UPS systems

• Cooling equipment

• Network paths

These systems are independent, not just “backed up.” They don’t rely on the same switches, circuits, or failure points.

For customers, this translates into fewer outages—and far fewer “we’re investigating an upstream issue” moments.

Why This Matters for Colocation Customers

When you colocate your hardware, you’re trusting the facility with the environment your servers depend on.

Your applications may be well-designed and resilient—but if power or cooling fails, none of that matters.

2N redundancy gives you confidence that:

• Maintenance won’t interrupt your services

• Hardware failures don’t automatically mean downtime

• Your infrastructure can stay online when issues arise

It’s not about perfection—it’s about resilience.

Redundancy Isn’t About Overkill. It’s About Predictability.

Not every workload needs extreme availability. But for always-on systems, customer-facing services, and core business infrastructure, redundancy is what turns uptime from a hope into a plan.

At Colo By The U, we design our facilities with redundancy in mind so our customers don’t have to build it themselves.

If you’re evaluating colocation and want to understand how redundancy affects real-world uptime, we’re happy to talk through what it means for your setup.

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Cloud vs. Colocation: A Smarter Fit for Predictable Workloads

For the last decade, the tech industry has repeated the same advice: move to the cloud.

And to be fair, the promise is compelling. Platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud make it easy to spin up infrastructure in minutes, avoid upfront hardware costs, and scale quickly when you need to.

But over the past few years, we’ve noticed a quiet shift.

More small and mid-sized businesses—especially those with steady, predictable workloads—are taking a hard look at their cloud bills and asking a simple question:

“Why are we still renting this?”

At Colo By The U, we’re seeing companies move critical systems out of the public cloud and back onto physical hardware. Not because the cloud is bad—but because for certain use cases, colocation is simply more cost-effective and easier to budget. Here’s why.

1. Renting vs. Owning: A Long-Term Cost Reality

Public cloud infrastructure is optimized for flexibility. You pay for what you use, when you use it, with no commitment.

That’s great—until you realize you’re using the same server 24/7, all year long.

If your workload is always on (web servers, databases, internal apps, file storage), you’re effectively paying a premium every hour for convenience you no longer need. Over a few years, those costs can add up to many times the price of the underlying hardware.

Colocation flips that equation.

You purchase the server once, then pay a predictable monthly fee for power, cooling, and connectivity. Once the hardware is paid off, your ongoing costs drop significantly—and stay stable.

2. Bandwidth That’s Predictable (and Understandable)

One of the most common surprises we hear about from cloud users isn’t compute—it’s bandwidth.

Uploading data is usually free. Downloading it is not.

For media-heavy sites, backups, or high-traffic applications, data egress fees can become a major (and hard-to-predict) line item. Month-to-month variance makes budgeting difficult, especially for small teams.

Colocation keeps bandwidth straightforward.

Our plans include clear, transparent bandwidth allocations, so you know what you’re paying for ahead of time—no per-GB surprises buried in a detailed invoice.

3. Dedicated Performance, No Guesswork

In a shared cloud environment, performance is abstracted away. Most of the time, that’s fine. Occasionally, it’s not.

When your virtual machine shares physical resources with other tenants, you don’t always control how consistent your performance will be—especially for I/O-heavy or latency-sensitive workloads.

With colocation, your server is exactly that: yours.

You get full access to the CPU, memory, and disks you installed. No noisy neighbors. No throttling. Just predictable performance you can plan around.

4. Budgets Love Stability

Cloud billing models are powerful—but they’re also complex.

Usage-based pricing, variable network costs, and dozens of line items make it hard to explain invoices to non-technical stakeholders. More importantly, they make it difficult to forecast costs accurately.

Colocation is intentionally boring by comparison—and that’s a good thing.

One server. One monthly price. Power, cooling, network included. No contracts. No surprise fees.

5. Centralization vs. Resilience

One of the cloud’s biggest strengths—massive centralization—is also one of its trade-offs.

When everything runs through a small number of hyperscale providers, outages and security incidents don’t just affect one company. They affect a lot of companies, all at once. And when those events happen, you’re competing for attention, fixes, and capacity at the exact same moment as everyone else.

For many businesses, the real risk isn’t data loss—it’s downtime.

If your applications, internal tools, or customer-facing services all depend on the same centralized platform, an upstream issue can bring work to a halt even when your systems are otherwise healthy.

Colocation offers a different model.

By owning your hardware in a physical data center, you reduce dependency on shared control planes and global infrastructure layers. Your server doesn’t wait in line behind millions of others for recovery priority. If there’s a problem, it’s local, diagnosable, and fixable—often faster and with fewer unknowns.

This doesn’t mean colocation replaces the cloud entirely. Many businesses use both. But for core, always-on workloads, decentralizing where they run can meaningfully improve resilience when large-scale disruptions occur.

So… Is the Cloud Ever the Right Choice?

Absolutely.

If you need to scale up dramatically for short periods, run experiments, or deploy infrastructure temporarily, public cloud platforms are hard to beat. They’re incredibly good at what they were designed for.

But if your workload is steady, predictable, and always running, owning your hardware often makes more financial sense—and gives you more control in the process. 

For many teams, colocation isn’t about rejecting the cloud—it’s about diversifying risk and keeping critical systems available when centralized platforms are under strain.

When Colocation Makes More Sense Than the Cloud

If you’re currently running workloads in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud and wondering whether colocation might be a better fit, we’re happy to talk through the numbers.

Take a look at our pricing or reach out—we’ll help you figure out what actually makes sense for your workload, no pressure.

👉 [View Colo By The U Pricing]

You purchase the server once, then pay a predictable monthly fee for power, cooling, and connectivity. Once the hardware is paid off, your ongoing costs drop significantly—and stay stable.