I am looking for a number of servers (say 40 dedicated machines) each with their own IP, not in the same IP address range, spread around the world. It can be Linux of windows PCs. Does anyone know of a good solution or service for this? I have looked into EC2 from Amazon but they do not have the support I need. Ideas?

Note: I am not looking for caching services or exclusively web hosting. The machines should have different external IPs, possibly different locations and also be able to run desktop windows applications.

Might want to team up with someone else on this (I mean this as in someone who specializes in running servers for other people in different parts of the world.). It's not easy to run a totally fresh IP. You have to essentially be in different locations.

Prevents people from hacking on the go.. And then going into another area to change their IP address to avoid detection.

Not knowing what you are trying to accomplish, that's a very difficult question to answer. Are they doing failover and redundancy? Load balancing? Different tasks completely?

Personally I think that the OS is not the solution, although Linux is more scalable and will perform better. But you will most likely need a solution running on Linux that provides the desired outcome.

It's a bit difficult to answer when we don't know what you're trying to use the servers for.