Amazon doesn’t have much of a presence here in Australia, but the limited set of services they do offer are excellent and affordable. I use Amazon Web Services to host this site, which is both extremely cheap (~1c per month) and extremely reliable. Unfortunately, until recently their closest server was in Singapore, so the latency was really bad. Sometime in November however, they quietly launched a Sydney based data centre.
To get an idea of the difference this makes to the latency, head over to CloudPing. For me (I live in Sydney) it literally reduced the ping times by an order of magnitude (I had been using the default, US-East (Virginia) data centre for some misguided reason).
I decided to try it out by uploading my wilkinson-thompson.com content to a Sydney-based AWS data bucket, mapped to another domain I own 1. Boy did it make a difference! The page load time went from ~2 seconds to imperceptibly short.
Given this experience, I decided to port my main site to the Sydney data centre. Unfortunately, achieving this required deleting the AWS data bucket on the Virginia server and creating a new bucket in Sydney, simply because of the way the name server redirects work within AWS. This is not ideal for the additional reason that you cannot create a bucket with the same name for about an hour after deleting one, which I assume is a caching/name-server issue.
All told, the cent or so a month it costs to host my site on AWS went from great value to insane value. I understand that other people around the world will now have horrible load times for this site, but let’s face it, only me and you (mum) are reading it.
Note that AWS hosting is only for static sites. Luckily, my website happens to be a static site. ↩