I am working on a website that is used by people all over the world. Currently we have a web server that is in Oregon and a database sever that is in Chicago.
When users from the US access the site it has pretty good load speeds. Recently we've been getting complaints from users in far away places of the world saying that the site loads slowly for them. I began running some tests and it looks like if you hit the site from those countries it is easy to see load times of 5-7 seconds (compared to 1-2 seconds in the US).
Is this type of slowness to be expected considering where our servers are living?
What are some steps I should consider to speed up access in areas that are geographically distant from our servers?