And DO is already immensely expensive compared to VPS at OVH, or actual dedicated hardware at Hetzner, OVH, Online.net, Scaleways, KimSufi, however they are all called.

I'm in Australia so I either pay a premium (100x) for an Australian VPS, or deal with 150 (US) to 400ms (EU) latency. I'm "locked out" of Hetzner et al due to that - and yes, I know there's nothing you can do about the speed of light. I just wish Australian/New Zealand/Singaporean/Hong Kong offerings were more competitive (all of those are <200ms)

Digital ocean have servers in Singapore for the same price as all their other ones. The latency from Perth is about 40ms from memory.

167ms from Canberra, on the NBN. Terrible routing though - I wonder what it would have been pre-TPG takeover, though.

Have you checked out vultr? I host my VPS there with no issues and extremely good ping.

Other comments regarding Vultr's billing in this thread have put me off it completely.