You need to be on the edge, they say.
Be close to your users. Minimize latency.
Here is an example. My book recommendation project Gnooks, which I run on a server in Germany:
Does it feel too slow for anybody?
Over the last years, I have gotten many thousands of suggestions from users on this project. Yet, as far as I can remember, nobody ever touched the topic of latency. While the largest group of users is from the USA.
Would like to hear how it feels from Australia compared to other websites. Like Hacker News, Goodreads and Wikipedia for example.
Fun aside related to latency: I've sshed from France to Australia, modal editors are so much easier over those latencies, as you can effectively queue up commands and round-trip time leaves you with enough time to plan you next key strokes.
From Europe that would give you 2x the latency an Australian user would see which should help illustrate their worst experience.
Yes, DNS is a different issue. To bring that down, I would have to use a distributed DNS I guess.
The cool part is, you can test this reliably, and see if it matters. That'll get you a concrete answer.