You can get servers with ECC RAM. All our servers there are 16 GB ECC RAM. I have been with them for a few years now and they have always acted very promptly on network issues (most of the times you don't even notice them)
how do you deal with the huge latency to Germany from the USA?
In some cases the location is actually an asset. Surprisingly, not everyone lives within the US.
More helpfully, the partial solution is to use either the Rackspace or HPCloud CDNs. Both of them are pretty cheap and both use Akamai, which gives you PoPs everywhere that matters. In my case (Australia), Amazon doesn't have a PoP for Cloudfront nearby so I using Amazon means I'm stuck with either West Coast US or (even worse for routing reasons) Singapore.
If you are big enough then you might be able to find yourself a better CDN deal, but most of the cheaper ones don't have a POP down here.
There is certainly higher latency but you can mitigate the effect by
1. Making lesser HTTP requests by using best known practices (for example YSlow recommendations)
2. When you start growing, moving static assets to CDN etc
3. When you grow even more move servers to US :)
