I cannot even begin to express my utter disappointment at the price of bandwidth in Australia, all I can say that its not justified. We have local clients being hosted in the US and they have not expressed any concerns with latency or stability. Hardware will fail no matter what its geographic location is, you just need to put faith in the people that are managing it.
Australians generally expect a high of level of standard especially if they are paying hard earned cash for it. Some users have criticised our strict criterias with accepting freehosting, they fail to see the bigger picture and that is to maintain the highest level of quality.
Zoomcities evolved roughly the same time as iContact-Hosting did and I have seen plenty of positive feedbacks regarding their services and instead of looking at it negatively from a business perspective, we choose to look at it as a positive representation from a collective group of Australian hosts.