Sizing your hosting step by step with the Architect
Before comparing offers, you need to know what you actually need. Serious sizing happens in four steps, from real demand to full pricing. That is exactly the path the Architect, DataColoc's sizing tool, walks you through.
Start from real demand, not intuition #
Most fleets are oversized because they were estimated by feel. Measure your machines' real load over a few weeks: processor, memory, storage, bandwidth. That measurement, and it alone, grounds honest sizing. Then add predictable growth over 12 to 24 months, no more, no less.
Step 1: space #
Count your equipment in rack units (U), including network gear, power strips and working room. A standard server takes 1 or 2 U; a full rack offers 42 to 47. Depending on the total, the right size is a quarter rack, a half rack, or one or more racks. Too big costs you every month; too tight costs you a redeployment.
Step 2: power #
Electrical power, in kW per rack, is the first price factor. Add up your machines' real consumption, not the power supplies' maximum rating, which overestimates twofold. Allow a 20 to 25% margin. And check the site's allowable density: a rack full of GPU servers quickly exceeds what a classic site accepts.
Step 3: connectivity #
Three questions decide: what throughput you really need, with what redundancy (two separate carriers for resilience), and with which IP addresses. If you want to stay portable, plan your own addresses and their BGP announcement. This step also constrains the site choice: the carriers present differ from one data center to another.
Step 4: resilience #
What outage can you tolerate, and what data loss? The answer sets the level to pay for: simple off-site backup, a standby site, or a dual active site. Pointless to pay bank-grade resilience for a showcase site; dangerous to do the opposite.
Pricing: total cost, not rent #
Once the need is set, price everything: space, energy, connectivity, services, over time. DataColoc's Architect guides these steps one by one and produces a price on an identical basis across sites, with the provenance of every figure. You reach operators with a precise specification, which changes the negotiation.
The two classic mistakes #
First: sizing "just in case", and paying every month for dormant capacity. Second: forgetting what surrounds the servers, the network, the outlets, the growth margin, and having to renegotiate after six months. The real load measurement protects against both.
FAQ #
The load measurement takes a few weeks running in the background. The synthesis itself, with a guided tool like the Architect, takes minutes.
Before. Your power, connectivity and resilience needs rule out some sites and qualify others. Choosing the site first means fitting your need to the offer instead of the reverse.
Size the stable base for colocation and leave the variable fringe in the cloud. That is the classic hybrid architecture, and the cheapest over time.
Written on 1 September 2026.
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