Colocation billing software that reads the rack
A colocation invoice is space, power, bandwidth, addresses and the odd cross-connect. FluxBilling bills each of them from the record that describes it — the rack and its U-positions, the kW on the service, the switch port’s 95th percentile, the IPAM allocation — so the invoice cannot drift from the floor.
What a colocation invoice is made of, and where each line comes from
Generic billing software sells services it provisions. Colocation sells access to space, a power envelope and a port — so each line has to be read from the physical record, not typed into a contract.
| Line | How FluxBilling bills it |
|---|---|
| Rack space | A recurring product for a full, half or quarter rack or a number of U. The customer’s devices sit at U-positions in that rack, so what is billed and what is occupied are the same record. |
| Committed power | The kW sold is stored on the colocation service and counted against the rack’s power budget — kW, circuit amps, voltage and redundancy — so overselling a rack shows up before the breaker does. |
| IP transit | 95th percentile, commit-and-burst, per-GB transfer or flat. Overage above the commit is priced at the close of each cycle and becomes an invoice line. |
| IP addresses | Allocated from IPAM, scoped to the site, linked to the customer. Released through the same record when the service ends. |
| Cross-connects | Recurring products. The physical path is recorded on patch-panel ports — front and rear connections, cable type and colour. |
| Remote hands and one-offs | A manual invoice, or a line added by staff to an open invoice. |
95th percentile, computed by the platform, not in a spreadsheet
The port is polled every five minutes. At the close of the cycle the platform sorts the month’s samples, discards the top 5% — about 36 hours of bursting in a 30-day month — and prices whatever is left above the commit. The overage lands as an invoice line, or on a proforma if that is how you bill.
A stalled poller that repeats the same sample would skew the percentile and double-count transfer, so repeated timestamps are dropped before they reach the maths.
How 95th percentile billing works, with a calculator- 95th percentileFive-minute samples from the switch port; sort the month, discard the top 5%, bill what is left above the commit.
- Commit + burstThe 95th with a committed-rate floor: usage below the commit costs nothing extra.
- TransferTotal bytes in the period, with included transfer per product or per service and a per-GB rate beyond it.
- FlatNo overage at all — the port is the price.
- DirectionInbound, outbound, the sum of both, or the higher of the two at each five-minute sample. Set globally, per product, or per service.
- Tiered overageProgressive tiers: each slice of overage is priced at its own rate, the way transit contracts are written.
Sold capacity against the breaker
Every rack carries a power budget in kW, the circuit’s amperage and voltage, and a redundancy label. Allocated draw is the sum of device watts and the kW on each colocation service, and the headroom view rolls that against the budget — the number to check before promising another customer 2 kW.
Commit-plus-overage versus metered power is a commercial choice with real consequences; the trade-offs are written up here.
More than one building, one customer account
Locations are first-class. Racks, inventory and IP pools belong to a site, so an order at site B draws addresses from site B’s pool and nowhere else. Products carry per-location prices, and the customer keeps one account, one balance and one invoice across every site.
Invoices carry per-country EU VAT, reverse charge for validated businesses, and proforma documents where your market expects them — see Billing.
What it does not do yet
Stated up front, because a colocation estate is the kind of business where a missing object turns into a spreadsheet nobody trusts.
- No dedicated cross-connect object with two named endpoints, and no meet-me-room topology view. Cross-connects are billed as recurring products, with the cabling recorded on patch-panel ports.
- Metered power is only as automatic as your PDUs allow. Committed kW is modelled and billed; turning per-outlet readings into invoice lines can be a plugin-builder project, depending on the hardware.
- No facility modelling — power chain, cooling, floor plans. Tools built for operating the building do that; this is billing and inventory for the operator selling space in it.
- Transit billing needs the service linked to a switch port that is polled. A service without a port produces no samples, so there is nothing to bill.
Colocation billing, answered
- What is colocation billing software?
- Software that invoices colocation customers for what they actually take in the building: rack space, power, bandwidth, IP addresses, cross-connects and one-off work. The hard part is keeping the invoice tied to the rack, the circuit and the port, so a record never says one thing while the floor says another.
- Does FluxBilling bill 95th percentile bandwidth?
- Yes. The switch port is polled every five minutes, the month’s samples are sorted, the top 5% discarded, and the value left above the commit is billed as overage — inbound, outbound, summed, or the higher of the two per sample. Commit-and-burst, per-GB transfer and flat billing are the other models.
- Can I bill power per kW?
- Yes, as committed power: the kW you sell sits on the colocation service and counts against the rack’s power budget. Billing metered consumption automatically depends on what your PDUs expose; ask before you assume a hands-off pipeline for your hardware.
- Does it handle several data centres?
- Yes. Locations are first-class: IP pools, racks and inventory belong to a site, products carry per-location prices, and the customer still gets one account and one invoice across sites.
- Is DCIM a separate licence?
- No. Racks, U-positions, power budgets, patch panels, IPAM and out-of-band control are in every tier, in the same database as the invoices.
- How do cross-connects work?
- They are billed as recurring products, and the physical path is recorded on patch-panel ports. There is no dedicated cross-connect object or meet-me-room view yet — if cross-connect management at scale is central to your business, ask us for specifics first.
The records these invoices are read from
- DCIMRacks, U-positions, power budgets, patch panels and out-of-band control.
- IPAM and IP transitSite-scoped address pools, rDNS, and the transit billing models in detail.
- DCIM software for hosting and colocationThe category guide: what DCIM does and which kind of vendor fits whom.
- Billing colocation line by lineSpace, power, cross-connects and remote hands — how to price and invoice each.
- Quote to rackedThe colocation onboarding sequence, and where it usually leaks revenue.
- Billing across several data centresLocations, IP pools and per-site pricing before you open the second site.
Try it on your own data. Refund inside 14 days if it’s not the fit.
Pick a tier and provision a tenant in under two minutes — isolated K3s namespace, your own database, the full product. If FluxBilling isn’t the right fit inside 14 days, open a ticket and we’ll refund the subscription. No sales call, no qualification gate. Want to look around first? The live demo opens the admin and client panels with sample data, no signup.
- 01.< 1 minPick a tierLite from €4.95/mo. Upgrade later, no migration.
- 02.< 2 minProvision the tenantIsolated K3s namespace + your own PostgreSQL database. Full product, your data.
- 03.d0 — d14Refund inside 14 daysNot the fit? Open a ticket within 14 days and we refund the subscription. No questions, no qualification gate.