>$79 is an absurdly cheap price for that kind of hardware and connectivity

Well I dunno... Europe has some really cheap (and reliable) server hosters, for instance:

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4

49€ purchases you:

- i7-2600 Quadcore - 16 GB RAM - 2 x 3 TB SATA (Software-RAID 1) - 100 Mbit

I think the US/Canadian prices are simply inflated.