Questions[colocation](server)

I have a web server on a coloc host. All 'planned' activity is over HTTP. (There's no FTP server, no bittorrent client, no IRC bots, etc.)

My inbound traffic is consistently 5-10 times higher than my outbound traffic. (For example, over the past 24 hours I have served 228MB of data, but received 1.94GB.)

1. Is this standard/expected for a web server? (Am I perhaps getting slammed with thwarted nefarious attempts whose packet size versus a 0-byte response overwhelms the normal inverse relationship?)

2. If this is not expected, what tools should I use to investigate where the traffic is coming from? (The server is running Ubuntu 10.04.)

The company I use ranges from $136-$495 per month, per server, ranging from low-end (AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+) to enterprise (Intel Dual Xeon X5650, A/B Power).

The biggest pro for renting a server is if hardware fails they replace it for you. But if you have enterprise servers, $400+ a month can get expensive.

At what point would colocation be more cost effective? As in, how many servers would have have to be renting for colocation to be better? Any other pros and cons?

I have a couple of Dell Poweredge R200 coloed in the US and thinking to move some of them to Europe. I am wondering if this is possible without modification (regarding 110 vs 230 voltage difference)? I am also not sure what is the amper usage of Dell R200.

I'm about to terminate my relationship with my hosting provider of many years, but I'd like to securely wipe the box before I do. This is a dedicated server running Debian on a single EXT3 drive and although I have root access, I can't boot alternate media since it's headless in a rack somewhere.

I don't need multiple passes, but I would like to wipe free space if possible. Basically I'd like to walk away and make sure I don't leave any of my personal data behind. I'm worried that the box might crash before it finishes wiping/syncing the filesystem if I just run srm -R -s /

When ordering co-location services, a certain amount of power is included, for example 0.25 amps, 0.5 amps, 1 amps, 2 amps, etc. How do I calculate how much a server is going to require?