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It could be your distance from the server. It's physically located on the east coast of the USA, so there's a lot of possibility of congestion between you and it. I'm on the west coast of the US, and to me it seems much more responsive now than it was before the move. The OS install is much more lean and minimalistic than the default VPS install from our webhost, and the security is much tighter than before. It should be better all around.
I've just installed and configured the XCache PHP module, and it appears to have sped up the rendering times by about triple. It should be noticeably faster even from NL.