I just got back from a round-the-world trip, researching trends for Radar. In Melbourne, Australia, I met with Pete Yandell and Matthew Walker from Alien Camel (the creators of AlienCamel.com, 9cays, and Monkey On Your Back).
One interesting data point from the conversation was the fact that it’s 5-10 times more expensive to host a website in Australia than it is to host it in the US or Europe. As a result, AlienCamel.com is hosted solely in the US and Europe, and many other companies in Australia are doing the same. So, there’s a high demand for American and European hosting facilities with short network hops to Australia. I suspect that, ironically, when companies outsource their hosting to other countries it keeps the demand for local hosting artificially low, and over time will tend to keep local prices high.
I’m curious how widespread this phenomenon is. New Zealand and South Africa both have high latency/low bandwidth to destinations outside the country, so locally hosted sites still have a significant advantage. What’s the hosting situation in your country?