Why Cheap US Based Hosts Are Bad Value

I am currently trying to download a site backup for a client that is moving from one of our cheap competitors who basically resells some American hosts servers.
God it is painful!
I’m getting less than 30k / sec when I should be getting at least ten times that!!!
If I had to deal with that kind of connection to this server, or any of the other ones that I deal with on a regular basis, I’d never get anything done and would end up incredibly frustrated.
Ping speed from my desktop to this server:

Ping statistics for 81.17.240.197:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 16ms, Maximum = 18ms, Average = 16ms
Ping to cheap US based host:
Ping statistics for xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 146ms, Maximum = 172ms, Average = 159ms
Talk about bad connectivity!!!
So you really do get what you pay for .. or do you?
For €30 ex-VAT you can get an Irish based hosting account with plenty of disk space and bandwidth. The key factor being that it’s a service that will work and won’t have a bad ping ie. there’s no latency
On the other hand you could opt to go with a cheap provider and not only pay more but actually get less. There’s no point in having loads of disk space and bandwidth if the connection is so bad that you can barely make use of it!!!