I live in Australia and was wondering if I should buy a VPS from a local host or someone overseas as we don't have the greatest internet speeds here.
Are there countries you would prefer to host your servers in for the benefit of their connection speeds?
I'd tend to think that you should be worried about the bandwidth between the intended clients and the VPS. If your intended clients are mostly in .AU it would make sense to get a VPS located in Australia. Who do you intend to be clients?
If you targeting the world as potential clients, I'd probably start with a server located somewhere outside of Australia. As you scale up you can make the decision to obtain geographically varied hosting (and whatever technical mechanism you want to use to distribute clients-- GeoDNS, etc) to spread clients around the various hosting sites efficiently.
Womble might disagree with me here, but Australia does have pretty shitty datacentre uplinks, and to get a good one it costs a lot of money. Which means that a decent VPS hosted in Australia is going to cost you a lot more than getting one hosted in the US.
That said though, if you're running something that's latency dependant (like, streaming videos) then you need to go for as few hops as possible, which means that you should be getting a physical location as close as possible to your customer base.
What you can get at home != what a datacenter hosting your VPS has available. You should be fine getting a VPS from a host local to you.
It all depends on where your customers are. If you're customers are in Australia, then a VPS in Australia will have better response times than if your hosting else where.
Also, you may want to stick with local currency. Depending on the cost, it may be a 'business risk' if your hosting bills go up & down at the whim of the exchange rate. Which also begs the question, if you hosting in another country does that mean you can buy software licensing by pricing in that country? MS are notorious for 'fixing' pricing in different countries! Should we move all our hosting to china to get cheaper licensing? probably not.
