1. You don't want to use colocation but renting. Seriously, no reason to do that: colocation is more expensive and gives you no any advantages unless you have a

1. You don't want to use colocation but renting. Seriously, no reason to do that: colocation is more expensive and gives you no any advantages unless you have a very specific setup. It's even worse when a hardware component dies. 2. Do some research as to which provider gives you what you need for the best price. I tested many and finally stayed with Hetzner, your mileage may vary. 3. If you do anything serious, think about backups and failover first. 4. Don't consider RAID as backup. It can happen that multiple drives fail at once - and it does really happen. 5. Be prepared for a drive failure. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, you better start the diagnostics and rebuilding the array straight away. 6. Think about your failover strategy: will you be fine if your machine burns in a datacenter fire? If not, rent at least two machines in different locations. Making sure they're in sync is your duty and an interesting challenge in itself. 7. How are you going to send e-mail? If not via a smarthost (an external service by Amazon, Google etc.), you need to configure your server and DNS properly, add specific quirks for Google and Microsoft and be patient - building reputation takes time. 8. Do you need ECC? If you don't, you can use desktop CPUs with much better bang for the buck. [0] Most other quirks are related to your use cases, e.g. if you plan to do streaming, there are other factors at play that might influence your choice. [0] https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12 https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...