As far as I know, with Limesurvey Pro you can choose the location of your installation between Germany, USA, Canada and Australia I think. Not sure where I read that though. Oh, here it goes:
www.limesurvey.org/examples
Help us to help you!
Provide your LS version and where it is installed (own server, uni/employer, SaaS hosting, etc.).
Always provide a LSS file (not LSQ or LSG).
Note: I answer at this forum in my spare time, I'm not a LimeSurvey GmbH employee.
Thanks a lot for your input, that was really helpful.
I managed to resolve the issue by migrating the surveys and experiment to an US-based server with SSDs and much quicker i/o. The number of dropout dropped to almost 0%. (also works from Europe)
The mTurk audience was actually very helpful getting feedback and testing the new setup - so wasn't their fault