Firstly get your own IPs from your local RIR. Have your co-lo provider publish your routes, but they will be YOUR IPs. if you co-lo provider sucks, you can move and keep your IP space. (This is vital for email, but I recommend it for everyone).
Secondly buy a Out of Band Management card with your server (iDrac for Dell, iLO for HP, etc) these cost fairly little and will save you hours of access / remote hands. They will pay for themselves, you can even boot an ISO from your laptop over the internet. Get your co-lo provider to give you an extra uplink for this and give it a separate IP (use one of the providers range)
Thirdly consider Mission Critical support on the servers from a solid vendor (In australia I consider the enterprise vendors Dell, HP, IBM and Acer, and of those I will only use Dell or HP). 4 hour response means you don't need as much spare hardware, and you can have things fixed FAST. I have only lost 2 disks in a rack of servers over 4 years. Both had a replacement in place within 4 hours (once at 1am).
Fourthly look at a good Virtualization solution. We initially went oVirt (Open source version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) but ended up migrating to VMWare. VMWare Essentials Plus costs us $15K for 3 years in extortionate australia prices and is worth every cent. It provides Backup (VMWare Data Protector), Failover, Virtual SAN, Live Migration and a heap of useful features that save huge amounts of time.
Finally if your going to grow consider getting a rack (or half / third of a rack). This will likely give you unescorted access to the data centre, and is often not that much more then a few RU of servers (depending on the DC and racking availability).
Do not put your IPMI controller on a public IP without any sort of access controls in place. These controllers are pretty terrible security wise, and it's not a good move.
Buying the 4-hour support package for your servers is so worth it. You don't have to pay for remote hands since the vendor will dispatch a tech to replace/upgrade bad gear. If you handle your monitoring correctly, you can get a tech sent out to hot-swap a dead drive before you even realize it's failing.
In terms of picking a good colo, find one that has high security ratings in an area that doesn't have fluctuating power. If they're in Florida, make sure they're Cat 5 Hurricane rated. If they just happen to also have an entire floor dedicated to government hardware, or are on the same power grid as a hospital, and have buried fiber/power lines instead of exposed, even better!
We did this with APNIC (being based in Australia), and we were able to justify a /24 on a single server without multi-homing. I don't think they allocate less then a /24 so if you have cause for 1 you get the whole /24.
That said ARIN and others might be different. For example APNIC will only allow up to a final /22 allocation at the moment, where as ARIN just allocated a much larger block despite being on final allocation rationing.
"if you co-lo provider sucks, you can move and keep your IP space. (This is vital for email, but I recommend it for everyone)."
Why is this "vital for email"?
I agree that obviously if you can you want your own space.
But if you are planning your move you can handle the new ip space by dns ttl. Which is what we have done since the 90's with moves where we didn't have our own IP block. And yes it is a huge pain to be avoided so I'm not disagreeing just wondering about the "vital for email".
These days making sure email gets through is about jumping through a huge amount of hoops and having a long term "trusted" track record at the domain level, ip level, etc.
Spammers have gotten good, and because of that anti-spam efforts have had to increase their restrictiveness over time. Because of this reliably getting email out of your network and into another inbox is anything but trivial these days.
Firstly get your own IPs from your local RIR. Have your co-lo provider publish your routes, but they will be YOUR IPs. if you co-lo provider sucks, you can move and keep your IP space. (This is vital for email, but I recommend it for everyone).
Secondly buy a Out of Band Management card with your server (iDrac for Dell, iLO for HP, etc) these cost fairly little and will save you hours of access / remote hands. They will pay for themselves, you can even boot an ISO from your laptop over the internet. Get your co-lo provider to give you an extra uplink for this and give it a separate IP (use one of the providers range)
Thirdly consider Mission Critical support on the servers from a solid vendor (In australia I consider the enterprise vendors Dell, HP, IBM and Acer, and of those I will only use Dell or HP). 4 hour response means you don't need as much spare hardware, and you can have things fixed FAST. I have only lost 2 disks in a rack of servers over 4 years. Both had a replacement in place within 4 hours (once at 1am).
Fourthly look at a good Virtualization solution. We initially went oVirt (Open source version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) but ended up migrating to VMWare. VMWare Essentials Plus costs us $15K for 3 years in extortionate australia prices and is worth every cent. It provides Backup (VMWare Data Protector), Failover, Virtual SAN, Live Migration and a heap of useful features that save huge amounts of time.
Finally if your going to grow consider getting a rack (or half / third of a rack). This will likely give you unescorted access to the data centre, and is often not that much more then a few RU of servers (depending on the DC and racking availability).