Under an awarded contract you are not only choosing a supplier. You are choosing a building, and a group of people who operate it, and that is a harder thing to evaluate because almost nothing about a building can be established from a proposal document.
Everything that applies to any supplier on any cooperative contract applies here too, and the supplier evaluation checklist sets that out. What follows is only the part that appears when the thing being bought is floor space, power, and a promise to keep both running.
What to ask about the building
Which building, exactly, and who operates it? A provider may own the facility, lease space in somebody else's and resell it, or run a floor under a management agreement. All three are legitimate and they are not equivalent, because they decide who you are actually escalating to at two in the morning. Ask for the answer in one sentence and see whether it comes back in one sentence.
Can I visit? A facility that will not walk a prospective customer through the floor under escort has told you something already. A visit costs an afternoon and settles questions no document settles: whether cabling is managed or draped, whether aisles are contained, whether the place looks operated or merely occupied.
What happens if you lose the site? If the provider leases, the lease has a term. You do not need the commercial detail. You do need to know whether your agreement obliges them to provide continuity of service, and on what notice.
How far is it from us? Distance is not a technical requirement until the day somebody has to drive over with a replacement drive, at which point it is the only requirement that matters. What colocation does and does not include is set out in what colocation actually is.
What to ask about power and cooling
This is the one area with a precise public vocabulary, which is worth using because it converts an adjective into a testable claim. The Uptime Institute Tier Classification System defines four levels of data center infrastructure, and two of them describe most of what a public agency is choosing between.
A Tier III facility is concurrently maintainable: it has redundant components and redundant distribution paths, so equipment can be maintained or replaced without shutting down IT operation. A Tier IV facility adds fault tolerance on top of that, so when a piece of equipment fails or a distribution path is interrupted, IT operations are not affected, and continuous cooling is required.
Put plainly: concurrently maintainable means the facility can be worked on without you noticing. Fault tolerant means it can break without you noticing. Most agencies need the first. Rather fewer need the second, and Uptime Institute is explicit that the progression "does not mean that a Tier IV data center is better than a Tier II", because the levels fit different business operations. Buying more resilience than the workload justifies is a genuine way to overspend on this contract.
Then the question that separates a claim from a fact. Uptime Institute states that it is the only licensed firm that can provide these certifications, so "designed to Tier III" and "Tier III certified" are different statements, and only one of them has been checked by somebody other than the operator. Ask which you are being offered. Neither answer disqualifies anybody: plenty of well run facilities are uncertified, because certification is expensive and optional. A provider who blurs the two is the finding.
Two more, both concrete. Ask about the generator: runtime at full load, and the fuel supply arrangement. A generator with four hours of fuel and no delivery contract is a four hour generator. And ask when the plant was last transferred to generator under load, and ask to see the report. Every facility says it tests. The ones worth buying from wrote it down.
What to ask about the uptime number
Every provider publishes an availability figure, and on its own the figure carries almost no information. Three questions give it some.
What is measured, and at what point? Availability of the network, of the power feed to your cabinet, and of a server you lease are three different commitments. A network availability figure tells you nothing about whether your rack had power.
What is excluded? Scheduled maintenance is nearly always excluded and that is reasonable. The useful follow-up is how much notice you get, and whether anything caps how much scheduled maintenance there can be.
What does a shortfall actually pay? A service credit is normally a percentage of the monthly fee for the affected service. That is a contractual remedy, not compensation for your outage, and treating it as insurance is a mistake buyers make once. Whatever figure a provider quotes, ask for the service level agreement that defines it, because that document governs and the headline does not. Ask us for ours on the same terms.
What to ask about who can reach your equipment
Physical access control is a large part of what a colocation arrangement actually sells you, so establish it precisely rather than accepting that the building is secure.
Who is on our access list, and how does it change? Names, not roles. Then ask what happens on the day one of those people leaves your organization, because that is where an access list quietly rots.
Does anybody enter unescorted? Facility staff are in the room continuously, which is the point of paying for the room. The question is whether anyone can open your cabinet without your knowledge, and what gets logged when they do.
What counts as remote hands, and how quickly? Remote hands stretches from pressing a power button to seating a card and cabling it. Writing the scope into the requirement is covered in how to buy data center hosting through TIPS. The questions left for the supplier are the response commitment, what is in scope without a change request, and what is billed. An unbounded promise here is not generosity, it is an unpriced boundary that will be argued about later.
What to ask about connectivity
Carrier neutrality is a claim, and claims are testable. Neutrality is supposed to mean the choice of transit provider remains yours rather than the operator's, so these three questions establish whether it holds in practice.
How many carriers are lit in the building today? Present and serving customers is a different state from available to order, and the second one comes with a build interval nobody mentions at quote stage.
What does a cross-connect cost, to install and per month? This is the line most often missing from a comparison, and on any design with two carriers it recurs monthly for the life of the arrangement.
Can we bring our own carrier, and at what cost? If the answer is yes in principle and expensive in practice, then transit is bundled whatever the brochure says.
What to compare
When the quotes arrive, the monthly rate is the least informative number on them. Three other comparisons decide more.
Compare the three-year total, not the monthly figure. Space, power, cross-connects, remote hands and any bandwidth commitment together. What each of those costs is already published. A cheaper cabinet with expensive cross-connects is not cheaper.
Compare headroom. Ask each provider what happens when you need a second cabinet: whether it can be adjacent, and whether the power density you want is available in that room. Growth that cannot be placed in the same row is not growth, it is a second migration.
Compare the evidence, not the assurance. Two providers may both say their operations are audited. Ask what the report covers, what period it covers, whether the service you are buying sits inside its scope, and whether you may read it under a non-disclosure agreement. A provider who hands over a report is in a different category from one who names a certification.
Red flags
A tier claimed with neither a certificate nor a design document. The vocabulary is precise and public, so vagueness about it is a choice.
An availability figure with no definition of what it measures. A number without a measurement point is marketing.
No named facility. A reference to "our Houston data center" with no address, or reluctance to arrange a visit, usually means the floor belongs to somebody else and the relationship is thinner than the proposal suggests.
Unlimited remote hands. Nobody supplies unlimited labor. It means the boundary has not been agreed yet.
A quote with no cross-connect line and no power line. Either the design is unsettled or those costs are arriving after signature.
How to decide
Weight the things that cannot be changed afterward, and discount the things that can.
Location cannot be changed without moving, which is a project rather than a renegotiation. Power headroom cannot be changed once the room is full, and you will not be told the room is filling. Exit terms cannot be changed once signed, and getting out again already sets out the three answers to settle before you commit.
Price behaves in the opposite way. It is negotiable before an order and largely fixed after one, so it belongs in the decision without leading it. A provider who is ten percent cheaper in a room with no expansion capacity has sold you a saving and a future project.
Then record the reasoning while it is fresh: which provider, on what grounds, and what evidence would have pointed elsewhere. A public purchase gets read later by people who were not present, and a short note written now is all they will have to read.
Before you sign
Everything above is a question, and a question only binds once it is in the order. The named facility, the access list process, the remote hands scope and response commitment, the cross-connect charges, and the escalation path are all things you asked about and none of them travel into the agreement by themselves.
The coverage and the published ceilings sit on the data center contract itself, and the award is listed by TIPS. Put every question on this page to LABUSA in the same words you would use with anybody else. A provider that minds being checked has answered a question you did not ask.
If quotes are already in front of you and a second opinion would help before you commit, talk to us about what you have been offered.