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As a programmer/database guy, I have worked on a lot of different types of servers over the past couple of decades, both for mainstream and porn sites. I have also had to act as the go-between with many, many different hosting companies.
As Arnox noted, loading speed can be a big factor when it gets down to getting surfers to move past the first page. If your initial loading speed is low, it can hurt your business a lot.
For many of my clients, though, they saw great gains after switching to a setup where they co-located a server that they owned and set up (or paid a third party to set up) at a good data center. I have seen many, many, many instances of shared hosting companies that play all sorts of tricks with connection speeds and traffic, much of which is entirely invisible to your average customer.
A few years ago one of my clients (a local one) suspected that something wasn't quite right. After grilling the hosting company (and eventually threatening legal action), we found that their network was hosted on a single overloaded server with many other clients, all sharing a fraction of the bandwidth that each had been promised. The client had paid the hosting company to purchase and set up a private server, but the company had simply plunked them on a slow shared one and pocketed the money.
I finally convinced them to purchase their own server and have it shipped to me. With the help of another one of their contractors, we set up the server so that it would run optimally for the software they were using, took off anything that was unnecessary, tweaked it, and put it in a good data center within an hour drive of the client. Since our goal was to do a good job for the client and (hopefully) get more business from them in the future, we focused on their needs. Some hosting companies are more focused on their own bandwidth and server expenses, rather than making things are optimized for the individual customer.
When all was said and done at the end of the year, their savings more than covered the cost of us purchasing and setting up the server, the hosting cost, and the little bit of maintenance they needed here and there. Most importantly, though, their speed/bandwidth issues disappeared, and didn't resurface when they expanded and updated their network a year later.
Not everyone can afford to purchase a server and co-locate it. For those that are large enough (or profitable enough) to do so, though, it can often be a good move, both financially and in terms of performance.
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