this is true of all commercial leases; If they think it's hard for you to move, well, "market rate has gone up" That is the thing, though, generally speaking

this is true of all commercial leases; If they think it's hard for you to move, well, "market rate has gone up" That is the thing, though, generally speaking? it costs a /lot/ to fill a space. 10% of the total value of the lease is not unusual. So they try to get you in with a low rate, then jack it up later. Personally, I think a setup fee, then some sort of guaranteed low rate ongoing (maybe tied to the local price of electricity?) would make more sense. It's less costly for all involved if you sit at the same datacenter forever; it's just that the way that these things are sold, the owner of the data center wants to 'capture value' by raising your rates if it's hard to move. The owner of the datacenter also wants to start you out with a low rate, for the same reason; if they can get you hooked so that it's hard to move, well hey, they might break even the first year, but after year two or three, they are looking pretty good. Personally? I find this really frustrating. All parties, when working to maximize their own value, actually waste a whole lot of value for all involved. It's an example of capitalism destroying some pretty significant value. You see this in almost all cases where switching service providers is expensive (and, I think, it's one of the reasons why "the cloud" is so appealing.) Personally, I really like the idea of a 'condo' model for the data-center, and for renting in general. Yeah, you'd end up paying $100K+ for your rack, but it wouldn't take very long to make that up, and you'd end up owning part of the organization that controls the whole datacenter. I think the big problem with the condo model is that in regular condos, usually you don't have individuals that own 100s of units, while that's not at all unusual in a data center.