I found the whole procurement process to be really frustrating, as someone new to the world. You have to talk to salespeople (even for what is a commodity service) and pricing is very opaque. Moreover, there are pitfalls like the fact that a rack never comes with enough power to run more than 1/3 full, and everyone treats this as normal.
Yeah. I have experience procuring space for clients, but even so it's tough to get a reasonable deal on the west coast. In Dallas, I can routinely pickup a full rack with dual 20amp circuits, dual ethernet drops, and 200-400mbps unmetered for $700 a month. That's what I'm paying for racks in two separate Dallas datacenters currently.
If you're willing to go north a little bit, ViaWest might give you basically the same deal in one of their Oregon datacenters.
