Speed from Different EC2 Regions

Question

I'm based in the UK, as are all users of my web app, and currently host in the EU-West region. The US-East region is quite a bit cheaper and I'm using a service from another company that locate their servers in the US-East region (meaning that I'll have data transfer costs between regions if I kept things in the EU). Has much of a speed difference am I likely to see between the two?

(I could do a test myself but I'm hoping someone else has already done it :) )

I'd appreciate insights that anyone has. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I found a nice service which compares the speed and latency of different clouds and different regions: http://cloudharmony.com/speedtest

You can pick only the amazon services and test all regions.

Answer 2

Speed within Availability zones is very impressive. When you start talking about across continents you're going to get some lag and much less bandwidth. I think it would depend what you're passing over the network whether it would work in your case or not. However, to answer your question there is a very large difference in speed.