Equinix is the biggest name in colocation. It runs the buildings where carriers meet and hand traffic to each other. That is why people call these sites carrier hotels. If you want to sit next to everyone, you pay for the room.
And you do pay. Equinix is the premium option. A cabinet at an Equinix site costs more than the same cabinet at a regional operator. Sometimes a lot more. The question is whether the premium is worth it for you. Most of the time, part of it is and part of it is not.
Here is what the pieces actually cost.
The cabinet
A standard cabinet is a locked rack, usually 42U or 45U of space. In a major Equinix market, a full cabinet runs about $1,200 to $2,500 a month before power. The number swings by metro. A cabinet in Ashburn is cheaper than the same cabinet in a tight downtown building like 350 East Cermak in Chicago.
That is just the space. The cabinet fee buys you the four walls and the cooling. Nothing plugged in yet.
Power
Power is where the real money is. And it is where the markup hides.
Equinix bills power two ways. There is the circuit fee, which you pay whether you draw the power or not. Then there is metered usage on top. A 5 kW cabinet primary and redundant feed can add $800 to $1,500 a month by itself. Ask for the circuit fee and the usage rate as separate numbers. If they only quote you a blended figure, that is a flag.
Most cabinets never draw their full power allocation. You may be paying for a 5 kW feed and pulling 2 kW. That gap is money. We see it on almost every bill we pull.
Cross connects
This is the part that surprises people. A cross connect is a physical cable between your cabinet and another company in the same building. Your carrier. A cloud on-ramp. A peer.
Equinix charges a monthly recurring fee for each one. In the U.S. a single cross connect runs about $200 to $350 a month. That sounds small. But firms that run 20 or 30 of them are spending real money every month on patch cables that never move.
Equinix makes a large share of its profit on interconnection. That is not a secret. It is the whole business model. The building is worth what it connects to.
Where the markup hides
Three places, every time.
Power you do not use. You signed up for a feed sized for growth you never hit. That circuit fee bills anyway.
Cross connects you forgot about. A vendor churned two years ago and the cable is still cabled and still billing. Nobody cancels it because nobody remembers it.
Auto renewal. Equinix contracts renew on their own if you miss the window. That window is usually 90 days before your end date. Miss it and you roll into another term at a new rate. Put the date in your calendar the day you sign. Most people do not.
Is the premium worth it
Sometimes yes. If your business depends on sitting one cross connect away from a specific cloud or a specific carrier, an Equinix building may be the only place that works. You are buying the address, not the rack.
But if you just need space and power, and you do not need the dense meet-me room, you are overpaying. A regional operator two miles away may cut your cabinet and power cost by 30 to 40 percent for the same gear. We had a media client cut a colocation bill by $3,100 a month by moving low-priority gear out of a premium building and leaving only what needed to be there.
You do not have to move everything. Split it. Keep the cabinets that need the interconnection. Move the rest.
Upload your last Equinix invoice and we will show you which line items are premium you need and which are premium you are wasting. The power gap alone usually pays for the review.