How important ....... ?

[MarkTiarra]

VERY important. Being that it's my job to guarantee sales returns on my designs, I have to monitor every aspect of my client's projects that I can. Increased speed on their page load times can bring up sales more dramatically than anything other single factor. This is not to say you design your pages so graphically free as they have no visual appeal, but there is a balancing act and having great hosting is well worth the investment.