[jlawer]

GCP is a non-starter for us due to Region support. No Australia, Singapore or even US west regions means that latency is too high. CDN / caching can make web performance acceptable, but service performance will always suffer. Unfortunately over half of .au traffic routes to Asia via the US west coast (due to lower cost), with the rest route via Japan, Guam or Singapore. This means Taiwan would be a 300ms route for a significant portion of our audience.

AWS is what we use for cloud provisioning, with Rackspace still hosting some legacy systems. We are moving our workloads off Rackspace as the cost is higher. Azure is a possibility but unlikely as they are as expensive as AWS and offers nothing that we feel is especially compelling as a Linux shop.

If Digital Ocean, Linode or similar offered an Australian hosting option I would be willing to look at it if the cost was under 2x that of a US region, as I could get a similar functionality having SaltStack handle provisioning. However knowing bandwidth and related costs in .au I really doubt many want to go through the cost & effort.

Most of the domestic providers are either too expensive ($40-$80 AUD a month for a 1 core / 1gb instance w/ HDD backed storage & 100 GB transfer), and/or aren't run to the scale that you can have confidence that they will be an ongoing competitive business.

[kyrra]

FYI, GCP is getting new regions later this year. US Western region in Oregon and East Asia region in (Tokyo) Japan.

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/announcing-two-...

[mikecb]

And 10 more unannounced locations through '17. I'd be surprised if a single AUS wasn't one of them.

[meta_AU]

Check out Vultr. They used to only offer 1/10th bandwidth to AU, but pretty sure you get full bandwidth now. They are coming close to feature compatible with DigitalOcean (BSD, DNS, anycast dns)

[jlawer]

Hadn't heard of Vultr, but they look awesome and prices appear right.

BGP is an awesome feature for my use case (mail), but unfortunately 32gb instances aren't available in Sydney and one of the virtual appliances I run have that as the recommended config for the traffic level I am pushing. Other feature that would be really good would be some bulk storage to hold backups on (in addition to the automatic backup feature). Additional Block storage isn't available in SYD.

Thanks for the recommendation.

[Veratyr]

OVH recently sent out surveys suggesting that they're expanding to APAC soon and as others said, Vultr offers Australian instances, albeit with Australian bandwidth prices (thanks Telstra).

[jlawer]

Would be really surprised if OVH hit Australia before Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong or Taiwan, but crazier things have happened.

Something worth monitoring, thanks.