We're aware that performance of the site is rather low (particularly at peak times as you would expect).
Geography is one factor, but not actually one which is so siginificant. At the end of the day, folks all over the world hit sites outside their own country/continent all the time, and that doesn't guarantee poor performance. While pings are of course slower than to that of a UK based machine, they've never been terrible as far as I've seen, and when they've been a little slow, it hasn't been terribly slow.
Now we've got the facilities to monitor the server and traffic more closely, we've had quite a surprise - all you four-rings fanatics are gobbling up quite a resource (and of course we're more than happy for that to be the case), and certainly more than we had previously thought.
We've suffered a few 'crashes' since the upgrade, and we tracked the cause to scripts running during peak periods 'pushing us over the edge' - that's been sorted, so reliability should be improved.
We're no longer seeing huge spikes in server load, but there are certainly quite steep curves at certain parts of the day. Connections were surpassing limits in the lunchtime rush, which is when we were suffering the most. That's been resolved now, so again, reliability should be improved, and performance should take a little lift too.
My spare 'tinkering time' has been taken up sorting out the email issues we've had, now that's resolved I'll have more time to continue investigation/resolution work on performance issues.
Thanks for your patience,
Rob.