I worked full time in a DC for a couple years, and pretty much all of the above is possible, but you will pay for what you don't do yourself. Most servers in t

I worked full time in a DC for a couple years, and pretty much all of the above is possible, but you will pay for what you don't do yourself. Most servers in the wild, at least where I work, are Dell or HP (both with 4 hour hardware replacement plans for about 1k/yr) If you buy your own, you should set it up, and configure it before you ship it out, and typically there will just be a racking fee (0-100$), if you just send out bare metal, the OS install etc, will be extra. Typically, colo's will have a KVM available for you to rent/use for setup or troubleshooting hardware issues (ie boot problems), if you want to go that route. EVERYTHING is negotiable. Not being a dick client goes a long way in getting things done. Ie, if the colo has a policy that any work being done is X$/hr, if you are cool, don't open tickets for inane things, and exhausted all your options, you can typically squeeze a lot of free work out of us. How were you burnt w/ the dedicated server? IME, those are guaranteed NO downtime, and hardware failure is replaced at no charge and immediately , and a dedicated server failure takes top priority for the guys on the shift. Working in a fairly high pressure/low reward/24x7 environment is taxing, I sometimes miss it, but I like dev a lot more.