I'd love to colocate some hardware but all the options near me (Sydney, Australia) are insanely expensive for no reason, how do you go about finding affordable rackspace?
Ship it to the next best DC in a foreign country. Iceland, Sweden, Austria all have great DCs and connectivity and are the best prices outside of my city. Your latency will suffer but for personal, semi-professional you end up with a fun hobby.
Buy something second hand off eBay and have it shipped directly to the DC. Most are kitted with a KVM, so you can then configure all the settings when racked. When it's time to retire they are normally happy to do so for a small fee.
Same with spare hardware, send a couple of spare drives. Make friends with the DCops team and they'll be happy to swap parts.
WebHostingTalk is another good resource for research and colo offers/self hosting [0]
One day I hope for my own /29 but with IPv4 exhaustion don't count on it. A /27 when used sensibly works well.
I don't think your options are going to have great latency to Australia - unless gp is mostly hosting things for other (worldwide) users they should keep the servers closer than that for the best experience.
Been colocating for 10 years now, the best of both worlds.