Web Hosting, Supplemental

One thing I didn't include in my earlier web hosting post was a comparison of my old and new plans, so here they are:

As you can see, hosting in the USA is a much, much better deal than here in Australia, and pair.com isn't particularly cheap (they are excellent, though). I've heard of Australian websites running their site locally, but saving a tonne of cash by running US hosting for their image files. This would really only work for very large websites, and would be complete, utter, frothing-at-the-mouth overkill for my little site, particularly as I've shifted almost all of the big images off onto Flickr and trimmed the design down significantly. There's also the question of how much storage and bandwidth I actually need. Hamfisted did 17GB of data transfer for the month of January this year, but August and September hovered around 4GB, and October was down to about 2GB. While it's always nice to have the capacity to serve videos of the cat choking on a furball whenever I need it, it remains only that - nice to have. In the end, that delicious low ping was enough to sway me over to going local.