Hosting Performance

In an article from Entrepreneur.com, "Keep your online customers happy by switching to a faster web host." Are you the faster host?? The article made me think of a few things:

1. Amazon S3 for using off-site storage
2. Delaware.Net was looking to swap mirrored servers with other hosting companies. This way he had physical redundancy - and so would you.
3. Shared E-Mail Server. We talked about it in Atlanta, but AFAIK it never took off. I wonder if using a hosted email service provider wouldn't make this easier for some ISP's. Especially with the constant work required to keep email up and going, along with virus and spam fighting - and storage requirements.