I'd love to colocate some hardware but all the options near me (Sydney, Australia) are insanely expensive for no reason, how do you go about finding affordable rackspace?
Buy something second hand off eBay and have it shipped directly to the DC. Most are kitted with a KVM, so you can then configure all the settings when racked. When it's time to retire they are normally happy to do so for a small fee.
Same with spare hardware, send a couple of spare drives. Make friends with the DCops team and they'll be happy to swap parts.
WebHostingTalk is another good resource for research and colo offers/self hosting [0]
One day I hope for my own /29 but with IPv4 exhaustion don't count on it. A /27 when used sensibly works well.