[doublerabbit]

Ship it to the next best DC in a foreign country. Iceland, Sweden, Austria all have great DCs and connectivity and are the best prices outside of my city. Your latency will suffer but for personal, semi-professional you end up with a fun hobby.

Buy something second hand off eBay and have it shipped directly to the DC. Most are kitted with a KVM, so you can then configure all the settings when racked. When it's time to retire they are normally happy to do so for a small fee.

Same with spare hardware, send a couple of spare drives. Make friends with the DCops team and they'll be happy to swap parts.

WebHostingTalk is another good resource for research and colo offers/self hosting [0]

One day I hope for my own /29 but with IPv4 exhaustion don't count on it. A /27 when used sensibly works well.

[0] https://www.webhostingtalk.com/

[account42]

I don't think your options are going to have great latency to Australia - unless gp is mostly hosting things for other (worldwide) users they should keep the servers closer than that for the best experience.