After doing a lot of research, I'm getting close to choosing a new host. I am located about 75 miles from Atlanta, and most of the sites I host on my reseller account are local business type sites.

I'm liking HostFrog, and they are located in Atlanta as are their servers, and I have spent the past week watching their site and their forums. Is there any noticeable difference in speed / performance if one is using servers that are local to the majority of one's customers i.e., will my sites load faster if someone in Atlanta is viewing them, vs. if my sites are on servers were in Texas? Because SJR is my other top prospect right now, and they are in Texas.

barely noticeable difference... difference would be in ping time, and it would be milliseconds difference, everythign else being equal. try pinging both the ip addresses- the texas and atlanta ones- to see what kind of response time you get. you'd probably barely notice any difference at all.

Given the very small distance (after all we're talking basically about the speed of light) the page load speed will be much more influenced by how loaded the server is. That's what you need to investigate -- if possible.

I have used SJR and they are top notch. Support is excellent.