Affordable Colocation Services: Five Data Centers, DDoS Protection Included, With 1U Plans Starting at $35 a Month

There is a particular kind of panic that sets in around 2 a.m. when the office air conditioner decides it has had enough. You hear the click, the hum stops, and somewhere in the back of your mind a small voice reminds you that the rack in the closet is now slowly cooking itself. That, in a nutshell, is why people start Googling "affordable colocation services." They want their servers somewhere safe, somewhere cool, somewhere that is not the broom closet next to the break room.

Colocation, if you have not had the pleasure, is the grown-up version of "I will keep my stuff at your house." You own the server. A data center provides the power, the cooling, the bandwidth, the physical security, and the 24/7 staff who will not fall asleep on the couch. You pay rent for the space and the watts, and in return your hardware lives in a building designed specifically to keep it alive.

What people are actually looking for when they search "affordable colocation services"

The keyword says "affordable," but what most folks really mean is a small bundle of demands that they are too polite to list out loud:

• A price that does not require a board meeting to approve

• Bandwidth big enough that the site does not choke on a Tuesday afternoon

• Power that stays on even when the local grid has a bad day

• A location close enough to drive to, but far enough from a flood plain

• Someone, anyone, on the other end of a phone at 3 a.m.

The reason "affordable" sits at the front of the search is simple. Building your own mini data center is ruinously expensive. Generators, UPS units, HVAC, redundant fiber pulls, biometric door locks — the bill adds a zero or two before you even buy the first server. Colocation lets you convert all of that capital pain into a predictable monthly line item. That is the whole pitch in one sentence.

Where Sharktech fits into the conversation

Among the names that come up when you start digging into cheap-but-reputable colocation, Sharktech is one that keeps appearing. Founded in 2003, they run five facilities — Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, Chicago, and Amsterdam — and they sit on enterprise-grade real estate from the likes of Equinix, CoreSite, H5 Data Centers, and CrownCastle. Translation: you are not renting space in a repurposed self-storage unit. You are getting a corner of a building that was engineered for this exact purpose.

Their colocation page is refreshingly plain about pricing, which I appreciate. No "call us for a quote" dance. They lay it out per facility, and the numbers move around quite a bit depending on which city you pick.

If you want to see the live pricing and current promotions yourself, here is the link I used for this article:

👉 Explore Sharktech colocation plans and pricing

The plans, broken down without a spreadsheet

Sharktech splits colocation into two rough sizes: a "1-6U" tier for people with a small box or two, and a "10-42U" tier for people who are starting to think in half-cabinets and full cabinets. Every location offers both, and every location throws in the same network baseline — 10Gbps to 100Gbps uplinks with transfer starting at 300TB — plus DDoS-protected connectivity and 24/7 on-site engineers.

Here is how the five cities stack up.

Chicago — the budget pick

Chicago is where Sharktech gets aggressively cheap. The 1-6U plan starts at $35 a month with 200-1200W of power included, and the 10-42U plan starts at $280 a month with 1600-5500W. For somebody colocating a single 1U firewall, a small NAS, or a couple of edge boxes, thirty-five bucks a month in a proper Tier-equivalent facility is hard to beat anywhere in the U.S. market right now. This is the option I would point a small business or a homelab-graduated hobbyist at first.

👉 Check current Chicago colocation availability

Las Vegas and Denver — the middle ground

Both Las Vegas and Denver start at $65 a month for 1-6U and $520 a month for 10-42U. Same 300TB transfer floor, same 100Gbps network ceiling, same DDoS protection. Denver is operated through H5 Data Centers space, which gives you a mountain-time-zone option that is genuinely useful if you want geographic separation from your primary site without flying three time zones away. Las Vegas is the obvious play for anyone serving the Southwest or trying to stay out of earthquake country on the West Coast.

👉 See Las Vegas and Denver colocation options

Los Angeles and Amsterdam — the premium locations

Los Angeles and Amsterdam both start at $99 a month for 1-6U and $792 a month for 10-42U. The premium here is pure geography. Los Angeles is the right address if you are serving the Pacific Rim or you need a West Coast landing point for trans-Pacific traffic. Amsterdam is Sharktech's European foothold, and at $99 for a 1-6U box it is actually competitive for a continental European presence — the same tier in many carrier-neutral AMS facilities runs well into three figures before you blink.

👉 Compare Los Angeles and Amsterdam colocation plans

What you get for the money, regardless of city

The pricing above is the headline, but the thing that makes these plans "affordable" in the useful sense — not just cheap — is that the included features are the same across all five facilities. You are not buying a stripped SKU and then paying à la carte for everything that makes a data center a data center.

• Network: 10Gbps up to 100Gbps ports, with transfer starting at 300TB. That is not a typo. Three hundred terabytes on the entry tier.

• Power: 200-1200W on the small tier, 1600-5500W on the larger tier. Enough headroom for a modern 2U box with a couple of beefy GPUs, or a full cabinet of modest 1U servers.

• DDoS protection: Included on the network, which is Sharktech's whole origin story. They have been selling DDoS-protected hosting since 2003, and game-server operators are some of their loudest fans precisely because of this.

• Hands on site: 24/7 on-site technical support, not a ticket queue that gets looked at on Monday morning.

• Free IPv6 allocation and a /29 IPv4 block (5 usable IPs) on the colocation service.

Who is this actually for

If I am being honest about who searches "affordable colocation services" and then ends up happy with Sharktech, it is a fairly specific crowd.

The game-server and DDoS-target crowd. Sharktech's own testimonials lean heavily this way — operators of Minecraft, Counter-Strike, and similar communities who get hit with multi-gigabit attacks on a weekly basis and need a network that absorbs them quietly. The included DDoS protection is the whole reason they are here; the colocation pricing is a bonus.

Small and mid-size businesses exiting the on-pre era. If your company has outgrown the closet server but is not ready to write a five-figure check for a private cage at a hyperscaler, a 1-6U slot in Chicago at $35/month is a very rational next step. You keep the hardware, you keep control of the configuration, and you stop worrying about the air conditioner.

People who need geographic diversity. Anyone running a primary site on the West Coast and wanting a warm standby in a different seismic zone — Denver or Las Vegas — gets that for a price that does not require a second mortgage.

European entrants on a budget. The Amsterdam $99 1-6U entry point is genuinely interesting for a U.S. company that needs a EU footprint for latency or GDPR-residency reasons and does not want to commit to a half-rack.

A few honest caveats

The colocation prices listed above are the published "starting at" figures on Sharktech's site, and they were live when I pulled this article together. Promotions rotate, inventory at a given facility fluctuates, and the truly deep discounts tend to land on their dedicated server and VPS lines rather than the colocation page — Sharktech regularly posts coupon codes like v5LACHI, 10GbpsCHI, and XROWB007CP for those product lines, but I could not find an active, verified colocation-specific promo code from the official source at the time of writing. If a coupon exists for colocation today, it will show up on the order flow through the link below.

👉 See live colocation pricing and any current promo codes

The other thing worth saying plainly: "affordable" is relative. If you need a full 42U cabinet in Los Angeles, $792 a month is a fair market price, but it is not cheap in the way $35 in Chicago is cheap. The sweet spot in Sharktech's lineup is unambiguously the 1-6U tier, and especially the Chicago version of it. That is the plan that makes the word "affordable" in the search query actually mean something.

The bottom line

Affordable colocation services, as a category, work best when the provider has already absorbed the expensive parts — the building, the generators, the cooling, the multi-hundred-gigabit upstreams, the DDoS scrubbing — and is willing to rent you a slice for less than it would cost you to own any of it. Sharktech has been doing exactly that for over twenty years, across five cities, with pricing that starts low enough in Chicago that a single 1U box becomes an impulse-buy-adjacent decision. If your 2 a.m. air-conditioner anxiety has finally pushed you to move your server out of the closet, they are a name worth a serious look.

👉 Start a Sharktech colocation plan