Hi Darren,
Colocation is good if you can either afford the best hardware with RAID, redundant PSUs (power supplies) etc. With colocation, you are responsible for the hardware and the up-keep of it.
However, its a dedicated resource to you and your sites and means you are not sharing with anyone else.
GD is version 2.x and you can choose if register_globals is on or off. Simply a line in .htaccess with enable/disable it.
If you sign up at the weekend - it will be activated at the weekend
Tom