In an increasingly uncertain market driving costs down is critical, everyone expects reliability and high performance at their data centre but compared to other parts of Europe Ireland is not the cheapest for doing co-location. This is mostly due to high electricity & bandwidth costs. However there are some simple things any IT administrator can do to keep their costs down.

- Shop around, there can be a massive different in prices from one data centre to another.
- Keep the servers small. (1U to 2U)
- Move old or underutilized servers to virtualization.
- No setup fee’s! Nobody likes setup fee’s and most data centres don’t have these hidden charges.
- No contracts! A good co-location provider should be flexible.

Finally when choosing a data centre you should check that the prices are displayed on their website. A good data centre will display their prices in a clear and transparent manor.