Dietikon, Mon 12 Oct 2026

Renting a Server Room With Fiber Internet

I recently moved to a new place. Previously, we had fiber internet at home and I could do all my Mapterhorn data work on my workstation at home. But the new place has only Copper with 100 Mbps download and 40 Mbps upload. 100 Mbps is 1 TiB per day, which is a bit too slow especially for future work on aerial imagery which will involve hundreds of terabytes of data. Also, while initially I just did all the processing with a single workstation, I now have multiple nodes and some of them are 19 inch servers with noisy fans. Therefore, I was looking into renting a server room with fiber internet.

The requirements for the room were that it is not too far away, has unrestricted physical access, power outlet, fiber connection, ventilation, and tolerance against noise. Not important were A/C, power stability, and physical security. Let's have a look at some of the options available.

First option: colocation. Here, you rent server rack space in a datacenter. It is really nice and really expensive. The datacenters here in Switzerland can have high initial setup costs for things like power outlets or fiber connection, you may have to do long contract commitments, power can be billed ahead of time by capacity instead of by usage, datacenter internet is maybe an order of magnitude more expensive than residential internet, you can only host 19 inch rack mount servers, and in general the pricing is intransparent and numbers have to be quoted first. So this seems out of reach for the moment.

Second option: hobby room in a residential building. I found one or two such offers online but some rooms were too far away or had no fiber pre-installed. And putting noisy servers in the basement of an apartment building might lead to discussions with the tenants, in particular if the window needs to be open for ventilation.

Final and selected option: Room4U. The concept of Room4U is that they have a building in an industrial area with many 18 m2 rooms each with a door and separate key, window, power outlet and fiber connection. People use those rooms for storage, for a hobby, as an office, or, like in my case now, as a server room. The room has neither heating nor air conditioning.

The room rent is CHF 320 per month. I chose a 10 Gbps fiber internet subscription from Galaxus for CHF 39 per month. Electricity costs on average 0.24 CHF/kWh with an additional 0.1 CHF/kWh invoiced by Room4U, i.e., in total 0.34 CHF/kWh.

At the moment I am still setting up things and not everything is running yet. Maybe I can write more about the full compute and storage cluster in the future and do a cost breakdown of everything.

I am glad to have found an affordable place to experiment with hardware and build a nice cluster.