[damncabbage]

Point taken about OrionVM. I worry about their long-term future as speed to the US becomes less of an issue, though.

I see what you mean about BigCommerce. The admin panel is painful (and I've heard that the actual system is hell for their employees to hack on), but they're definitely doing a roaring trade, and the instructional articles and videos they provide along with their actual product are rather useful.

The environment the Australian startup scene is a bit odd. We can't (easily) accept payment from US customers (and vice-versa), so we effectively have a little "bubble" in which we can set up paid products without much fear of the existing US startups stomping all over us.

Interesting times.

[nl]

Point taken about OrionVM. I worry about their long-term future as speed to the US becomes less of an issue, though.

They fixed that speed of light problem? :) We're going to be stuck on 100ms ping times until that is fixed (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sydney+to+los+angles+at...)

OTOH, I'm not sure what they will do when Amazon opens their datacenter (if that really is their plan).

We can't (easily) accept payment from US customers (and vice-versa)

That's not really true. Yes, it is more work than "include this Javascript file and you can accept payment" (aka Stripe), but if you are prepared to do some work it isn't that big a deal. Plus there is always Paypal. (Also, most US countries accept Australian payment. Some won't ship here, but that's a different problem)

[damncabbage]

  That's not really true. Yes, it is more work than "include 
  this Javascript file and you can accept payment" (aka 
  Stripe), but if you are prepared to do some work it isn't 
  that big a deal.

It is if you want to display your prices in US Dollars to American visitors: http://blog.angrymonkeys.com.au/why-being-an-aussie-startup-... (with discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098224 )

Summary: You CAN do it if you have enough cash.

(This post also addresses the PayPal point. You're stuck with Payflow Pro, which is much pricier, especially for a bootstrapped startup.)

  (Also, most US countries accept Australian payment. Some 
  won't ship here, but that's a different problem)

Point.

(They won't usually quote prices in AUD, but that's much less of a problem.)

[sanswork]

I don't see Amazon opening up an AU datacentre for a very long time(and probably never). They have Singapore now which will cover a much larger market then Australia will ever be for them.

[orionvmjoseph]

It's coming sooner than you may think..

However it doesn't really pose a risk to our market niche. We differentiate ourselves from Amazon on numerous fronts, primarily performance and paradigm. Both of which are sustainable for the foreseeable future.

Amazon coming to Australia mainly poses a risk to traditional VPS hosting and commodity cloud providers.

Personally, Amazon joining us here shows that validation and maturity of the market in Australia has been reached and is a big boost to our business.

[nl]

It's coming sooner than you may think..

That's what I hear too (I work in an area fairly closely related) - although some think it might be just a CDN node.

[nl]

Singapore sucks for Australian connectivity. Best case is ~50ms round trip to Sydney (which is half to West Coast US), but some ISPs route to Singapore via the US because the bandwidth is cheaper[1][2] (yes, this is insane).

[1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=45867

[2] http://akb.id.au/2011/amazon-ec2-latency-australian-soil

[asharp]

Yep. Best path through is via SeMeWe3 to singapore which is fairly fast. Most people end up with bw through PPC1 or SX which both end up in the US. People mostly do this because SeMeWe3 is stupidly congested and expencive compared to say PPC1, and most traffic goes through to the us rather then europe/asia.

Also remember that PPC1 when it stops over in Guam can end up coming back into asia via Asia-America gateway/etc. I'm not sure if any of the major providers actually backhaul through there.

[sanswork]

It may suck to Australia but Australia is a tiny market in the grand scale of things which is why I don't see a full ec2 data centre going in. CDN node sure but I don't see anyone launching EC2 instances in Sydney anytime soon.

[nl]

Australia is a tiny market in the grand scale of things

No we aren't! We are one of the few rich countries where the economy is growing, and our currency is very strong. At the moment we are very attractive to offshore companies because we offer revenue growth.

Amazon executives are in discussions with several large independent data centre providers in Australia to house another availability zone for its global cloud computing service.

http://www.crn.com.au/News/267585,amazon-hires-first-aussie-...

[sanswork]

The only people that would benefit from an EC2 cluster in Australia are Australians. For everyone else its just more latency. It's not a huge market, I worked in Sydney for the past 3 years and I'm very much familiar with it and its recent growth but its still tiny. I just don't see the demand being high enough to warrant anything more than something like CloudFront.

[robryan]

From what I heard this will be happening very soon, can't remember the exact times but it's definitely on the cards if not already being setup.

[brc]

I thought there was only one US country?

The shipping thing is either: (a) company has a fear of foreigners, usually instilled via chargebacks from dodgy countries (b) company sells things that have different distribution arrangements for Australia and the local distributor wants their monopoly.

In the case of (a) use a mailbox service like MyUs, in the case of (b) use a mailbox service like MyUs, then ring up said distributor and tell them how much money they failed to extort from you.