Most colocation agreements describe how to begin in considerable detail and how to end in a single paragraph. That asymmetry is not accidental, and it becomes expensive at exactly the point when you have least leverage to do anything about it.
Leaving a facility is a project. It has a critical path, it has costs that do not appear in the contract, and it has one characteristic that distinguishes it from every other infrastructure project: the counterparty whose cooperation you need is the one you are leaving.
The notice clause is a date calculation, not a sentence
Start with the renewal mechanics, because they determine whether you have a decision to make or a fact to accept.
Most agreements auto-renew unless notice is given within a defined window before term end. Ninety days is common; one hundred and eighty is not unusual for larger deployments. Miss the window and you have renewed, typically for a further full term.
Two details decide whether that window is usable. The first is whether notice is measured from term end or from an anniversary date, which are not always the same. The second is what form notice must take — written, to a named party, by a specified method — because a clause requiring registered post to a legal address is not satisfied by an email to your account manager, however much that email was acknowledged.
Put the window opening date in a calendar the day you sign. Not the deadline: the opening. Deciding whether to leave takes longer than serving the notice does.
What exit actually costs
The contract will usually be silent on most of this, which is why it surprises people.
Parallel running. You cannot generally turn one site off and another on in the same instant. For some period you are paying both, and that period is set by how fast you can migrate rather than by how fast you would like to. Two to three months of overlap is ordinary for a deployment of any size.
Deinstallation and make-good. Many agreements require the space to be returned to its original condition. If you installed containment, overhead tray, custom cabling or supplementary cooling, removing it is your cost and your schedule. Read whether make-good includes cabling pulled back to the meet-me room, which is laborious and frequently overlooked.
Cross-connect termination. Each cross-connect is a separate circuit with its own termination terms, sometimes its own notice period, and sometimes a charge. A rack with twenty cross-connects is twenty small administrative tasks, several of which involve third parties who have no contractual relationship with you at all.
Crating, transport, insurance. Hardware in production is hardware that has never been packed. Original packaging is long gone. Transit is the point at which equipment is most likely to be damaged, and the warranty position on moved hardware is worth confirming before it moves rather than after.
Data destruction. If drives are leaving, somebody must account for what was on them, and a certificate of destruction is a document you want in hand rather than promised.
The lien clause
This is the provision that converts a commercial dispute into a physical one, and it deserves reading before signature rather than at departure.
Many agreements grant the provider a lien over customer equipment for unpaid sums. In normal operation it is unremarkable. During an exit it means a disputed final invoice can become a reason your hardware does not leave the building.
The negotiable position is narrow: the lien should attach only to genuinely undisputed, overdue amounts, and should expressly exclude sums under good-faith dispute. Without that carve-out, any disagreement about make-good costs — which is the single most common exit dispute — gives the other side physical custody of your assets while it is resolved.
The same instinct applies to reading the rest of the agreement, and our guide to the terms worth negotiating in a hosting contract covers the clauses that behave differently under stress than they read at signature.
Sequencing the move
The order is dictated by dependency, and the dependency that catches people is connectivity.
Network comes first, and it comes first by a wide margin. Circuits to the new site need ordering long before anything is racked, because carrier delivery intervals are measured in weeks to months and are not compressible by goodwill. Running both sites simultaneously requires connectivity between them, which is itself a circuit with its own lead time.
Then the new site must be ready to receive: space built, power energised, cooling commissioned, cross-connects in place. Moving hardware into a facility that is not finished converts a migration into a construction project with your equipment inside it.
Then migration proper, usually in waves. The first wave should be the least critical thing you have, because the first wave is where you discover what your runbook got wrong. Subsequent waves get faster as the process is debugged.
Only then decommissioning, make-good, and the final walkthrough.
Compressing this sequence is where exits go wrong. Every step after the first has a predecessor that cannot be bought out of.
Documentation you need before you give notice
The cooperation you need is easier to obtain while the relationship is ongoing. Collect the following before serving notice, not after.
A complete asset list with serial numbers, rack and U positions. A cross-connect inventory with circuit identifiers and the counterparty on each. Current power draw per circuit, which determines what the new site must provide. Any as-built documentation for work you commissioned. And the make-good baseline — ideally photographs taken at installation, because in their absence the original condition of the space becomes a matter of opinion, and the opinion that prevails is usually not yours.
Our guide to handover documentation describes the same artefacts from the other direction, and the overlap is not a coincidence: what you should have received at the start is what you will need at the end.
Leaving well
There is a temptation to treat an exit adversarially, and it is usually counterproductive. You need the incumbent's cooperation for access, for scheduling, for cross-connect termination and for the final inspection. None of that is improved by a difficult final quarter.
The providers worth dealing with understand this. A facility that makes leaving straightforward is a facility that expects to compete for the renewal on its merits, and that posture is visible well before you ever need it. If you are evaluating somewhere new, the exit terms tell you a good deal about how the relationship is intended to work — which is why they are worth reading first rather than last.
Talk to the Facility, Not a Reseller
Rax runs the sites it sells. Ask us directly about exit terms, make-good and what a migration into our halls actually involves.
Contact Rax Data & Energy