Colocation in Vancouver: common questions, answered

Colocation means renting space, power, cooling and connectivity for your own servers inside a provider's data centre. You own and manage the equipment. The provider runs the building, power, cooling, physical security and network access. Space is usually offered by the half rack, the full rack or as a private cage.

A carrier-neutral data centre lets you buy connectivity from any network provider present in the building, not only one tied to the facility owner. That gives you a choice of routes and contracts. It also lets you use more than one carrier for resilience. Ask how many carriers are on site and how fibre enters the building.

A cross-connect is a physical cable inside a data centre that links your equipment directly to a carrier, a partner or another customer in the same building. Traffic on that link stays inside the facility instead of crossing the public internet. Cross-connects are usually ordered from the data centre operator and installed by its on-site staff.

A second site lowers the chance that one local event takes all of your infrastructure offline. A power, network or building issue in one city is less likely to reach a site in another region. Many teams keep production close to their users in Vancouver and keep a second environment elsewhere that they can switch to.

There is no single rule: distance is a trade-off. Sites far enough apart are less likely to share the same local power or network risks. Sites closer together keep latency low when data is copied between them. Ask any provider for the distance between sites, the network path that links them and who carries the traffic.

A 99.99% uptime SLA commits the provider to no more than about 53 minutes of downtime a year. It is a contract term, so read what counts as downtime, how it is measured and what happens if the target is missed. An SLA sits alongside the facility's design, such as its tier rating and redundancy.

Data residency is the physical location where your data is stored. In colocation, it follows the facility you choose: the data on your servers sits where that building is. Organizations with privacy, contractual or sector requirements often ask providers to confirm the province and country where equipment is hosted. Check your own obligations with your privacy or legal team.

Hut 8 Canada runs two Vancouver data centres: VAN1 Vancouver Vault, in downtown Vancouver, and VAN2 Vancouver. Both offer half rack, full rack and private cage colocation with A + B power. Both are linked over a 100G national backbone to KEL1 Kelowna, about 270 km away, for Vancouver–Kelowna failover. Call 1-855-488-8472 (press 1 for sales).