Call it a blessing or label it as a curse, but now there are far too many datacenters out there or may be the way hosts present, confuses you at times.

I was looking for cheap dedicated servers and found whole array of datacenters which i had otherwise never heard off. May be my ignorance, but then every server provider/host showing a different datacenter, it seemed like there are many datacenters.

In reference to U.S datacenters specifically, how do i zoom in my seach for reliable and stable datacenter?

What all things do i need to look for?
I usually ignore how many sq. feet their floor area is or similar details. Do they help?

Datacenter Size isn't exactly the most impportant aspect to consider. In fact smaller datacenters tend to be better than larger ones because they have more interest in your welfare than a larger provider. However a larger provider tends to have a larger revenue stream for better performance, so really you are looking for a balance.

The Next Generation of Reliable Dedicated Servers is......... Softlayer.com However what is your budget?

I have servers in many datacenters in the USA.

We recently moved some services over to softlayer.com and can only say great things about them.

Larger the company the less attention to detail you get I believe.

The thing about datacenters as opposed to hosting providers is that there is an extremely large amount of money required to operate on a monthly basis. One of the places where many data centers cut corners is on top quality staffing and infrastructure maintenance.

The statement of a "large vs. small" data center is hard for me to agree with. Since data centers exist for adverse conditions (power outage, bandwidth cut, etc.) it is extremely important that your data center provider have the means to invest in active maintenance contracts for their infrastructure (UPS, generators, etc.).

Those are the factors that are most important in regards to a data center. The best recent example I can think of here is SAGO Tampa's prolonged outage at the end of 2007. A power fluctuation led to a cascading generator failure, etc. Those things could have been mitigated with active service contracts.

I totally agree on the lack of knowledeable staff being an issue. I have run into this issue before, and all of the best infrastructure and setup is not worth much without knowledgeable staff to run it and support it if an issue arises.

My vote goes for softlayer.com and Iweb technologies.