Hosting your rack in Marseille: the gateway to three continents

Marseille is not a cheaper Paris. It is a submarine cable landing point, which makes it the best French location for serving North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. This page explains when that changes something for you, and when it changes nothing at all.

Our Marseille site

MRS1 — Marseille

The site operator states around 800 m² of IT floor space and direct freecooling, for a PUE of about 1.15 — in other words a very low infrastructure consumption compared with the energy actually used by the servers. The site is linked to our Paris locations by a redundant fibre link.

What Marseille actually brings

The geography of submarine cables

Marseille is one of the main landing points for the cables linking Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. For traffic turned towards those regions, starting from Marseille rather than from Paris removes a land round trip: the difference is counted in milliseconds, not in percentages.

A fallback site that is not in the Paris region

One copy in Marseille and one copy in Paris means two regions, two power grids and two risk areas. That is the definition of a recovery plan that holds up.

Measured energy efficiency

Direct freecooling uses outside air rather than a chiller as soon as the temperature allows it. On a well designed Mediterranean site, that is what explains a stated PUE of around 1.15.

When Marseille is not the right choice

If your users are French and your traffic does not leave Europe, Marseille will bring you nothing that Paris does not already do, and you will lose a few milliseconds towards the Paris region. If you need maximum interconnection density — a lot of peering, a lot of operators within cross-connect reach — Paris is still ahead. Marseille is justified by the geography of your traffic, not as a matter of principle.

How much a rack in Marseille costs

The prices are identical on all our sites: from €24.17 excl. VAT per month (€29 incl.) for 1U and 50 W, up to €708.33 excl. VAT (€850 incl.) for a full 42U rack with 2 kVA. We do not charge more for Marseille because the site is better cooled, and no less because it is further from Paris.

See the offers and prices Configure my rack

Frequently asked questions about colocation in Marseille

Got a question that is not here?

Describe what you need and we will come back to you with a configuration and a price, not with a brochure.

Is the latency between Marseille and Paris a problem?

Our two locations are linked by a redundant fibre link on our own AS212815 network. For database replication or a backup, that poses no difficulty at all. For an application that multiplies synchronous round trips between the two sites, the architecture matters more than the link: let us talk about it before you order.

Is Marseille suitable for serving North Africa?

That is precisely what this site is best placed for in France. The submarine cables serving the Maghreb, the Middle East and Asia land in Marseille: your traffic leaves from there instead of coming down from Paris.

Can I start in Marseille and move later?

Yes. You can also split between the two cities without paying for transit twice, since the sites are on the same network.