Dear IPPC Competitors,
FYI, I am hosting the test competition server in the Northern Virginia (US) zone of the Amazon EC2, particularly zone 'us-east-1b'.
For minimum latency between the client and server, you will probably also want to create your client EC2 node instance in this zone (specifically 'us-east-1b' but any zone in Northern Virginia should also be fine).
Cheers,
Scott