Dedicated Servers advice?

[born2drv]

OK can someone tell me what I should watch out for when pricing out dedicated servers? I am looking at various plans between $80-120/month. Seems as though "location" is very important, and that I should be sure my server is "fully burstable up to 100Gb/s" or something like that to make sure it will be really fast.

Is it hard to setup your email stuff, DNS stuff etc? I am fairly new at all this. I guess Plesk or Ensim or whatever is what does all that, right? Would I need anything else?

I don't want to be taken like a chump on my first dedicated server setup, but to be honest, I know squat and I'm trying to learn all the lingo, etc. :) I'm fairly good with computers and pick up things very fast, so I hope I will be up to speed soon, any help or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[nipear]

I think platform is important. Windows based servers are much more expensive. For our win2k dedicated servers software is more expensive than the machines.

If you can figure out setting up your own dns server then everything else will be easy ;)... If you need a reliable inexpensive data center sticky me and I'll give you the contact info to where we are set up.