Yomar touched on the support a bit. We do our best to get problems solved as quickly as possible. As for the speed. At the bottom of the page we have the page generation times turned on. Even on the main forum listing where we have all of the portal boxes turned on the generation times are quite quick. We do a heavy amount of caching for quite a few different things which keeps things pretty fast.
There are some products that store everything in the database. We try to split things up a bit, language files, templates, styles are all stored in just plain text files. Anything static that doesn't change to often we put in regular files. This keeps the database from being overloaded and splits some of the load with the regular filesystem.
