Sadly the answer is, as often, it depends! Many rack space rentals will not permit you to just install whatever PC you fancy because it is potentially a risk t

Sadly the answer is, as often, it depends! Many rack space rentals will not permit you to just install whatever PC you fancy because it is potentially a risk to the neighbours in terms of fire or bad hardware, most will happily quote you to buy one their approved ones! It is pretty easy to get a rack space provider where the provider cannot access the machine but this can be good or bad. In some cases, I would rather they could shutdown the host if, say, the RAM is broken and replace it but if you would prefer to do this yourself, that is fine. In most cases, you will be given a public IP address directly mapping to your machine via a router/nat lookup so whatever services you open on your machine are open on that public IP address so pretty easy to setup RDP/ssh/whatever. Probably the biggest issue though is the extra work or hassle if something goes wrong. I remember at a previous company where some guy would frequently have to drive for 30 minutes each way to go to a data centre to perform certain updates that couldn't be done remotely. YMMV