How long?
 

If I'm reading correctly - co-location is when you send an actual server to a company to take care of it and maintain it for you. If this is correctly, how long is the turnaround time from the time you send it, to the time it's up and running?

How do you control it? Is it a remote access type of thing? Do you have ENTIRE control over the server? Or is it limited to what you can do?

When I sent my server to the data center. It arrived on a Monday morning and by 12pm Monday it was running. You control the server just like a dedicated server. Through the control panel and through ssh. I have full control over my server. I can do anything to the server just like it if was sitting next to me. The only thing I cant do is replace parts if something breaks. I even have a remote reboot switch where I can cycle the power and reboot the server. Just like if I pushed the reset button on the server.

My best advice I can give would be to rent a VPS from www.unixshell.com. And play around with it. That way if you screw something up. You can reload the OS in minutes.

Thanks for the suggestion Soul. I'll definitely look into unixshell.

Wow, 12 PM on the same day? That's a lot sooner and faster then I thought. Pretty impressive actually. I think that I'll have to hold off on co-location until I am actually ready for it. Are there any decent co-location ones in the states?