Jeff:

> Can folks recommend local colocation hosting providers?  Linux-friendly shops
> preferred as the colocated servers will be Linux.

It depends on your budget.  If money is no object and you want very, very 
good connectivity (presence) on the 'net, consider InterNAP.  We (my 
employer, Pason Systems) use InterNAP for colocated rack space.  
www.internap.com

We are very happy with it and it's actually not unreasonably expensive.
We manage our own servers so they don't care what OS we run - they just
give us an IP address range and 2 (redundant) ethernet jacks (and power
of course, to our rack) and that's where the servers live.

Their colocate is in the DTC.  They have all the redundant power systems
and dual/triple independent power feeds, redundant air conditioning, 
1 month's or week's worth of diesel fuel for the generators, etc.  It's 
pretty impressive.

If you just have a whitebox PC that you want to put on the network of
a small ISP then InterNAP is not for you - it's more of an industrial
strength solution.  As far as the connectivity goes they are on 9
backbones at the Denver colocate (Level 3 is not one of these backbones).
They have OC3 to Sprint, OC3 to UUnet, and DS3 to the other 7 backbones.

Everything they do is fault-tolerant or fault-resistant.  We've never
actually had an outage on our InterNAP internet service in almost
2 years.

-- 
Jim Ockers - Pason (ockers@pason.com)
Contact info:  http://www.pason.com/ockers.html

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