After extensive research, I have come to some conclusions about the entry-level hosting market:
- If I don’t mind being in the USA, it still doesn’t get cheaper than ServerPronto, for equivalent resources, not even with VPS.
- If I insist on local (Australian) hosting for latency reasons, I would have to go with a VPS, and probably pay more, especially for traffic allowance.
- The pain of moving to a new OS instance, essentially rebuilding from scratch, is too horrible to contemplate right now.
So Trouble is staying put for the time being.
In case anyone is interested, here’s a list of Australian entry-level VPS places, compiled with the help of the SAGE-AU technical mailing list:
I am, however, probably going to upgrade, once Hardy Heron is out, since it’s the next LTS release, and as such it has an in-place automated upgrade path from 6.06, which is getting a bit long in the tooth. This will be preceded by plenty of careful backing up and provision of lots of nice rollback mechanisms, so there will probably be more news here before any such upgrade goes ahead.
Later-the-same-day-edit: E points out that crucial.com.au are currently having a special which brings their rates down roughly into line with the competition!