Seattle Colocation: Why a Downtown Carrier Hotel Beats a Suburban Cage
Why Seattle colocation in a downtown carrier hotel beats a suburban cage: what 1000 Denny Way gives your racks, and when colo beats renting a VDS.
Search for Seattle colocation and you will find two very different products wearing the same name. One is a cage in a suburban warehouse off a freeway exit, priced to look cheap per U. The other is rack space inside a downtown carrier hotel, where the building itself is part of the internet. We run our colocation floor, and our own server fleet, in the second kind: the Lumen Seattle 1 facility at 1000 Denny Way. This post explains what a carrier hotel actually is, why it beats the suburban cage for almost every deployment under a rack, what our facility gives colocation customers specifically, and, because we sell both, when you should skip colocation entirely and rent a virtual dedicated server instead.
What a carrier hotel is, and why it matters#
A carrier hotel is a building where networks physically meet. Carriers terminate long-haul fiber inside it, an exchange point lives there or next door, and any tenant can reach any network with a cross-connect: a cable patched between two suites, ordered with a ticket and delivered in days.
1000 Denny Way is the historic Seattle Times Building, rebuilt as a 293,000 square foot colocation facility and now one of the most interconnected buildings in the Pacific Northwest. The numbers that matter to a colocation buyer:
- 40 on-net carriers terminate in the building, so transit is a competitive market rather than a captive one.
- Direct Seattle Internet Exchange access at 100G, with the Westin Building, home of the SIX, a few blocks up the street.
- Subsea proximity: Seattle is where trans-Pacific routes come ashore, which is why our March 2026 move cut latency toward Hawaii, Japan, and the rest of Asia-Pacific.
- Tier III design with N+1 UPS systems, N+1 chillers and CRAH units, and generator-backed power with a 48-hour diesel runtime on site.
When your hardware lives in a building like this, the network is a menu. When it lives in a suburban cage, the network is whatever the landlord managed to trench in.
Downtown carrier hotel vs suburban cage#
To be fair to the suburbs: if you need twenty cabinets and your cost driver is price per kilowatt, wholesale suburban space is a legitimate product. That is not most colocation buyers. For the 1U to 10U footprints we quote, per-U rent is the smallest line on a three-year bill, and the suburban discount gets eaten by everything around it.
| What you are buying | Downtown carrier hotel | Suburban cage |
|---|---|---|
| Carrier choice | 40 on-net carriers competing for your business | Whichever one or two providers built to the site |
| Reaching an exchange | A cross-connect, delivered in days | A metro circuit you rent every month, forever |
| Latency to the peering edge | Measured in the building | Every packet backhauls into the city and back out |
| Adding a carrier later | A ticket | A construction project or another monthly circuit |
| Carrier outage blast radius | Reroute across diverse on-net providers | Captive until the site's provider recovers |
| Physical work on your gear | Engineers already on the floor | A drive, a gate code, and a scheduled window |
The pattern is consistent: the suburban site rents you cheap space, then charges you every month to escape its location. The carrier hotel charges a little more for the space and turns every network problem into a short ticket.
What our 1000 Denny facility gives colocation customers#
NoBull Networks runs a deliberately small colocation footprint inside Lumen Seattle 1. Your gear shares the floor with the hardware behind our VPS and VDS fleet, cabled to the same standard and watched by the same monitoring, because we live here too. A footprint includes:
Space and racking#
- 1U, 2U, 4U, and 10U slots, with quarter and half rack footprints subject to availability
- Combination-locked cabinets managed exclusively by our staff
- Full rack and stack by our engineers: receiving, unboxing, mounting, structured cabling, and labeling, with a cabinet photo at handoff
- Blanking panels and managed airflow in every cabinet we run, because thermals are not optional
Power#
- 208V single-phase primary power on 20A circuits, delivered as independent A+B feeds for dual-PSU hardware
- Metered per-amp commitments, so you pay for the draw you reserve instead of a bundle
- N+1 UPS battery systems and on-site diesel generators behind every feed
Network#
- 1Gbps and 10Gbps ports on our multi-homed network, blending Lumen, Zayo, and Wholesail Networks (Ziply Fiber) transit
- Flat-rate or 95th percentile billing on either port speed, your choice
- Bring your own IP space: we announce your ARIN or RIPE prefixes for you, or route IPv4 and IPv6 from ours
- Optional dedicated Lumen transit or a dedicated Seattle Internet Exchange connection, engineered case by case through the facility
Security and service#
- SOC 2 compliant (audited by A-LIGN) and ISO 27001 certified facility with mantraps, two-factor access controls, and 24x7x365 CCTV
- An engineer-only floor: 24/7 certified remote hands cover swaps, reboots, and cable audits in minutes, because we are already there
- A credit-backed 99.9% network uptime SLA on colocation, with A+B power and 24/7 monitoring behind it
The full offering lives on the Seattle colocation page, and the datacenter tour covers the building itself in depth.
When colocation beats renting a VDS from us#
We sell colocation and we sell virtual dedicated servers out of the same building, so we have no incentive to shade this answer either way. Here is the honest split.
Colocation is the right call when:
- You already own the hardware. The capital is spent and the warranties are running; colocation lets that investment work from a better network than any office closet.
- Your hardware is not something we rent. GPU boxes, large storage shelves, licensed appliances, and HSMs all need a rack, power, and a fast port, not a hypervisor.
- Licensing or compliance is tied to the physical machine. Per-socket licenses and audits that require control of the box favor owning it.
- Your footprint is steady for years. Over a multi-year horizon, well-specced owned hardware can cost less than renting the same sustained capacity.
- You need your own address space announced. We announce your ARIN or RIPE prefixes from our multi-homed edge, so your network identity moves in with you.
A VDS is the right call when:
- You would be buying hardware just to fill the rack. The D-line VDS starts at $64.00/mo for 2 dedicated cores, 8 GB of RAM, and 160 GB of RAID-10 storage, with no freight, no depreciation, and no failed-PSU surprises.
- You want the hardware lifecycle to be our problem. On a VDS, a dying drive is our maintenance ticket, not your weekend.
- You scale in steps. Upgrades prorate onto a bigger plan; nobody ships a chassis.
- You live in the portal. Reinstalls, rescue mode, and snapshots arrive in minutes instead of remote-hands tickets.
- You are colocating a single 1U to save money. Price space, power, a port, and your own hardware risk against one flat rental number first; at single-server scale the rental usually wins.
| Colocation | VDS | |
|---|---|---|
| Up-front capital | Your hardware | None |
| Monthly bill | Space, power, and port, line-itemed | One flat number |
| Hardware failures | Your parts, our remote hands | Entirely our problem |
| Time to live | Freight plus racking, days | Minutes from the portal |
| Scaling up | Buy and ship another box | Prorated plan upgrade |
| Network underneath | The same multi-homed 1000 Denny edge either way | |
If you land on the rental side of that table, our VDS resources explainer breaks down exactly what dedicated cores, reserved RAM, and RAID-10 storage buy you.
How to get a Seattle colocation quote#
There is no configurator and no discovery-call carousel. Open one ticket listing your rack units, expected power draw, port speed, billing model, and IP requirements, and an engineer prices the whole footprint line by line. Ship your hardware with configuration notes and we receive, rack, cable, and confirm the handoff with a photo of the finished cabinet. Torn between flat-rate and a 95th percentile commit? Send 30 days of traffic graphs with the ticket and we will run the numbers both ways for you.
FAQ#
Where is your Seattle colocation facility?
Inside Lumen Seattle 1 at 1000 Denny Way, the former Seattle Times Building in downtown Seattle: Tier III design, 40 on-net carriers, and direct Seattle Internet Exchange access at 100G.
Can I visit my servers?
No, and that is deliberate. The floor is engineer-only, which is how every cabinet stays locked, labeled, and auditable. Our certified remote hands handle the physical work 24/7, with response times measured in minutes rather than site visits.
What is the smallest footprint you will quote?
A single 1U. We run a boutique floor, not a wholesale hall: 1U through 10U is the sweet spot, quarter and half racks are subject to availability, and if you need twenty cabinets by Friday we will tell you so honestly.
Is colocation cheaper than renting a VDS?
At single-server scale, usually not: space, power, a port, and hardware risk tend to outrun one flat rental price. Owned hardware, specialized gear, and steady multi-year footprints flip the math toward colocation. If you are unsure, ask for the quote and compare it against a VDS plan side by side; we will give you the same numbers we would use ourselves.