Formal quotes were required for the company I was working for at the time, company policy.
HN user
tzartz
Ah Hetzner. Good prices, screwy business practices. Got a quote from them for one rate, setup a demo and got shut us down saying that our application was against their TOS. Funny considering our app was at that point nothing but a near blank static website- we hadn't even fully deployed it. Talked to the sales guys who assured us it would 'be fixed'- but after 3 weeks of zero feed back we bolted. FWIW, the app we were going to deploy there was a simple website that provided contact info and PDFs of product manuals for their German clients.
I've never had luck with rails that weren't shipped with the device, but I know RackSolutions sells some universal shallow rails. I've never used them but I've seen them around.
Switches and routers sure- I've used it for things like that quite a bit- but I'd never put a server (even a 1U) in one. Ease of getting in and swapping parts is a huge factor.