Absolutely try to find a server that is in a datacenter near you, and verify that you can sustain relatively low latency to that server over the course of a few evenings. In my experience, the WoW Time Zone feature is meaningless in terms of setting raid times or play times for people.

This is helpful:

http://www.wowwiki.com/US_realm_list_by_datacenter

Also, take note of this for LA:

Please note that the Los Angeles servers are located in 2 separate datacenters, and as such the battlegroups are grouped oddly.
When doing a traceroute to servers in Los Angeles, the last hop should be one of the following:
  • 12.129.193.242
  • 12.129.193.246