The distance alone is BS. I regularly ping servers in the Netherlands, Australia, Europe and other places and get very decent ping times. Yes, there is going to be some difference in response because of the thousands of miles of distance, but you're talking like 40-80 ms of difference , not something that would really have a significant impact on download speed.

Sounds like your tech guy doesn't really understand routing. I just checked, and while my routing is different than yours (it goes ATT to San Francisco, then Global Crossing to Europe), it does look like there's a congestion issue between Global Crossing San Francisco and Global Crossing Amsterdam.

My guess is the problem might be with the total bandwidth on your server. If you only have a 10 or 20 Mbit connection and are serving 1Mbit videos, you're probably maxing out your bandwidth connection with just a small number (10 or 20) of people viewing your videos, so the server is scaling down bandwidth to each customer to serve the maximum number of customers. Each of our membership and gallery servers are regularly putting out 40 or 50 MBits each, sometimes bursting to 70 or 80 or even higher if we've just done a promotion to our affiliates.

As to moving servers to the US, I wouldn't recommend it. If you're living in Canada, operating entirely outside the US, you don't have to comply with the ridiculous 2257 regs. If you move your servers into the US, you become subject to US jurisdiction for 2257. Not that you shouldn't be compliant in any case if you have US affiliates and customers, but might as well avoid the additional oversight/regulation if you have can.

Looks like you're with Chilihost. Get with Luke or one of his tech people and I'm sure they can help you solve the problem.