is there any company that builts and ships boxes to whatever datacenter and ensures that they are properly taken care of?

The vast majority of companies will ship to the datacenter directly. What do you mean by "properly taken care of" ? Are you asking if they ensure that the server is racked and online at the datacenter, or something else?

-Steven

Thank you

yes, i meant that. Can you give adress of some such companies? And in the case of hardware failure, what happens if I co-located my server?

Generally, it depends on your location and where the datacenter is. I know that racklogic and interpromicro serve the northern California (Fremont) area. So without knowing the location of the colo facility, it's hard for us to give you good advice.

As far as hardware failure, generally in a colo environment, you will need to send the replacement to the datacenter and pay them for their time (if they fix the server), or you can go to the datacenter and do it yourself. Some datacenters stock extra equipment like hard drives, motherboards, ram, etc. while others don't.

-Steven

Originally posted by ferzan
Thank you

yes, i meant that. Can you give adress of some such companies? And in the case of hardware failure, what happens if I co-located my server?

this depends on your contract and colocation center. Typically though a colocated server is completely your responsibility - the provider will give you power ping and pipe and let you know when its offline. Its then up to you to get it back online. For hardware failures, I'd recommend a service contract - i.e. Sun, Dell, IBM, HP all provide service agreements and contractual times for getting a server back up and running. If you're not local to your colocation facility then I'd highly recommend a service contract - of finding a colocation facility that can give some serious customer support.

--Jack