The Australians are currently paying a lot for hosting their production instance. But do we have to? I just had a closer look and thought it would be worth sharing with everybody.
Australia and UK have both production servers with around 8GB of memory. Optimising the OFN code could reduce the amount of required memory. Staging sites are running with 2 GB.
Australia is using a c3.xlarge instance from AWS which costs around AUD 250 per month. The UK uses Digital Ocean. Their homepage advertises a similar server for AUD 102 per month. This one has a much larger SSD hard disk as our AWS instance as well.
We have also a more local New Zealand company here called Rimu Hosting. They offer a comparable server in Sydney for AUD 62. But this is without SSD disks. With SSD disk it’s AUD 82. There is also a cheap option without SSD for a US server which is only AUD 38, but probably a bit slow for us.
I did not look at the Australian company Digital Pacific, because their Linux images are terribly out of date and they don’t seem to care. They recently acquired Crucial, but they want AUD 240 for a server with SSD disks, similar to AWS.
Summary
AWS: $250
Digital Ocean: $102
Rimu Hosting: $82
You are welcome to add your research.