You can have a server that you purchased hosted in the DCS data centre (server room), and managed by DCS sysadmins.

It's got to be a rack-mountable server with rails, not a 'desktop' or 'workstation' form factor; Only servers that can slot into standard racks can go in the server room. Check this before you buy a server. Ask Support Team if you're not sure.

We provide the UPS-protected power and rack space, networking, console, and access to your home directory and other server shares available via NFS.

It would be installed with either the latest Debian or Ubuntu-LTS operating systems.

The systems administration is done by DCS tech support, so we have root access exclusively. We can install software, and we'll keep the OS up to date and patched. Also it will be monitored by Nagios so we are alerted if it becomes unreachable for some reason.

For convenience, sometimes the owner(s) of the system can be given sudo access to some commands, for example apt-get so they can install software on their own without having to ask tech support. This will be at the discretion of the DCS sysadmins; we would want to ensure the running of a stable system, so we would be reluctant to grant root privilege without sufficient good reason.