handsonhosting makes a good case for leased equipment, although I've always owned all my equipment after the tech bubble burst in 2000. I have 1/2 of it 1100 miles away in St Louis and really have little trouble in the 5 years I've been at that colo.

The one size fits all idea just doesn't work for everyone. I like to build everything myself, and without owning it, I can't do that. I'm not a web designer, I can hire someone to do that, just like the designer is going to hire a hardware person to do that for them. Everyone is going to have to look at all their option to make the choice of which is best for them, and go from their, and we've presented a lot of good ideas to start making those choices.

The big advantage that a dedicated server holds is that you do not face the same initial outlay. You don’t purchase a server and you don’t need to pay for suitable premises. Typically you should expect to pay anything from $100 per month for a lower end server, up to $300 or $400 for a server with high specifications.

Colocation enables you to purchase a server, so it becomes an asset to you or your company, and use somebody else’s data center. As soon as you purchase the server it will reduce in value and when it comes time to upgrade to a new server you will have to make full payment for a new server with very little return on your old one.

It depends on datacenter. Some high-end DC do not welcome small colocation customers and have extremely high colo prices up to 150$ per 1U rack space. No doubt you could rent entire server in same datacenter for the same price, but from somebody who renting entire rack or even more... Personally me, i do not see any reasons to have one or two servers for colocation if you have no super-rare requirments for hardware.

Not always true. It depends on DC level and type of space you need (rack or not). Big dedicated servers providers have huge discount on space due to high volume and sometimes they could offer dedicated server for lower price than 1U of space cost.

With colocation you pay a datacentre (or one of their customers) for space for the server, power (hopefully with UPS and filtering), Internet connectivity, support etc.

For a limited number of servers, colo will *often* be more expensive - this is largely down to colo clients knowing what they want, actually using the bandwidth they request etc, whereas the majority of dedicated server users only utilise a small subset of the resources allocated.