Mississauga Data Center, Toronto Colocation

Colocation (or "colo") means housing your own physical servers and IT equipment in a third-party data centre facility. You own the hardware; the data centre provides the physical space, power, cooling, physical security, and network connectivity.

Cloud hosting, by contrast, means running workloads on virtualised infrastructure owned by the provider; you never touch the underlying hardware.

Colocation is the right choice for organisations that need direct physical control over their equipment, have invested in hardware they want to maximise, operate workloads with specific latency or compliance requirements, or want the predictability of a fixed-cost infrastructure model. It is particularly common in regulated industries — financial services, healthcare, and legal; where physical infrastructure control and auditability are part of compliance frameworks.

The Uptime Institute's Tier classification system is the global standard for evaluating data centre reliability and redundancy. There are four tiers:

• Tier I: Single power and cooling path. No redundancy. Annual downtime risk: up to 28.8 hours.
• Tier II: Redundant components, but a single active path. Annual downtime risk: up to 22 hours.
• Tier III: Multiple active power and cooling paths. Concurrent maintainability; maintenance can be performed without shutting down your equipment. Annual downtime risk: under 1.6 hours. This is the enterprise standard.
• Tier IV: Fully fault-tolerant — any single failure, including maintenance, has zero impact on IT load. Annual downtime risk: under 0.4 hours.

Hut 8 Canada's GTA facility is built to Tier III-grade standards. It is important to note the difference between "Tier III certified" (independently verified by the Uptime Institute) and "Tier III equivalent" or "Tier III-grade" (meets the specification but has not yet undergone independent certification). We are transparent about our certification status and welcome technical questions about our infrastructure documentation.

Our GTA facility serves organisations across all industries that require secure, reliable, compliant Canadian infrastructure. Our most common client sectors include:

• Financial services: Banks, credit unions, insurance companies, wealth management firms, and fintech companies subject to OSFI oversight
• Healthcare: Hospitals, healthcare networks, health information managers, and digital health companies subject to PHIPA
• Legal and professional services: Law firms, accounting firms, and consulting organisations handling sensitive client information
• Technology: SaaS companies, MSPs, and software businesses building on Canadian-sovereign infrastructure
• Government and public sector: Federal and provincial government contractors, Crown corporations, and public institutions
• Energy and natural resources: Ontario-based energy companies and resource sector organisations with critical operational technology requirements

We do not publish a standard rate card. Enterprise colocation pricing is driven by several variables: the amount of space (rack units, half racks, full racks, cages, or suites), power draw per rack, network bandwidth and carrier requirements, contract term length, and any specific compliance or security build-out requirements.

What we do commit to is pricing transparency. Every proposal we provide is fully itemised; space, power, connectivity, cross-connects, remote hands allowance, and any one-time setup fees are listed separately. There are no undisclosed escalation clauses, no surprise overage fees, and no bundled services you didn't ask for.

To receive a detailed quote specific to your requirements, complete our short inquiry form or call us. We respond within one business day.

We offer contract terms starting from 12 months, with standard enterprise terms of 24–36 months that typically come with preferential pricing. We also offer month-to-month arrangements for specific use cases such as disaster recovery testing, short-term capacity overflow, or pilot deployments — though these carry a premium over longer-term commitments.

We are flexible. If your requirements are unusual, a specific term that aligns with your existing IT contracts, or a phased expansion structure; tell us and we will structure accordingly.

Remote hands is our on-site technical support service; meaning a qualified Hut 8 Canada technician physically attends to your equipment in our facility on your behalf.

Our remote hands service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Standard remote hands tasks include:

• Power cycling equipment (servers, switches, storage)
• Cable management and labelling
• Equipment inspection and visual status reporting
• Simple configuration changes under your direction
• Escorted vendor access
• Equipment delivery acceptance and rack staging

Response time for remote hands is a committed service level in your agreement. For most requests, response is within 30 minutes on-site. Emergency critical response is faster. We do not offer a best-effort service — we commit to a response time and we deliver against it.

Yes. We manage this regularly for clients transitioning from other GTA providers. A typical migration involves:

1. A pre-migration planning session with your IT team and our onboarding team to document your environment, dependencies, and maintenance windows
2. Pre-staging of rack space, power, and connectivity in our facility before any equipment moves
3. A phased cut-over approach that maintains your existing environment as a fallback until the new environment is confirmed stable
4. Post-migration validation and documentation update

We work around your operational schedule — most migrations are completed during off-peak hours or planned maintenance windows to minimise business disruption.

Our GTA facility is carrier-neutral — you are never locked into a single carrier relationship. We maintain connectivity with multiple Tier 1 and regional carriers, providing access to redundant network paths and competitive pricing through carrier competition.

Available connectivity options include:

• Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) from multiple carriers
• MPLS and private WAN connectivity
• Direct cloud connectivity to major public cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud) via dedicated private connections
• Cross-connects to other colocated customers and partners within the facility
• Access to peering through Canadian Internet Exchange infrastructure

If you have specific carrier requirements, existing carrier contracts you want to port, or complex multi-site connectivity requirements, our network team will design a connectivity solution around your needs.

Quote: We respond to all colocation inquiries within one business day. In most cases, a detailed and accurate proposal is in your hands within 24 hours of our initial conversation.

Deployment: Once a contract is signed, our standard onboarding timeline for a full rack or cage deployment is 5–10 business days from contract execution to your equipment being rack-ready. Complex custom suite build-outs may require additional lead time, which we will specify in your proposal.

If you have a tight deadline — a lease expiration, a contract non-renewal, a hardware refresh cycle — tell us upfront. We have managed accelerated deployments for clients with urgent timelines and we will be direct with you about what is achievable.