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
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.
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.