If speed and latency is important I’d advise using a cloud provider with geographically close datacenters. Amazon for example has locations in Ireland and Germany. For database hosting, most go with compose or mlab, both are running on cloud providers. They have availability in Ireland for example, so you could run you app and db in the same datacenter in that case. (A dedicated server is overkill for most meteor apps, but it depends of course)
Generally the speed difference isn’t that important for meteor apps and end-users won’t experience a big delay when your app runs in the US, but if you need low-latency and extremely fast load speed the only option is close geographical proximity.
I’ve done experiments with latency on various geolocations and the largest latency between two servers I found was between the US and China, which was around 300-400ms on average (with some peaks now and then). The latency between the US and Europe should not pass 250ms, so that’s hardly noticeable for normal use-cases.
