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Yes, speed matters. This is just anecdotal evidence, so feel free to dismiss it:

We recently switched hosting companies and our site load speed went from an average of 10 seconds to the new server speed of just under 1 second.

Our monthly revenue instantly doubled. People stayed on our site longer, they learned more about our products, and thus were more willing to shell over their hard earned cash.

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Speaking as a consumer, if I went to a site that took 10 seconds per page load, I wouldn't feel like I was dealing with a professional organization. I'm not going to expect high-quality products if you have low-quality web hosting.

Exactly. The hosting didn't start off that slow. When we first purchased the server slice the average page load time was about 1.5 seconds. But as time went on, the hosting company overstocked their servers and load times inflated horribly.

By the way, this crap hosting company is MediaTemple.

As a MediaTemple customer since January 2007 I can vouch for this. Their hosting service isn't what it was when the Web was courting them during the Web 2.0 hype era. I still pay them to host my blog (on hiatus), but now I use WebFaction for current projects and could not be happier with their hosting or customer service. I strongly recommend them.

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