Does it matter where you buy your URL from, besides price? I mean, could it affect how fast people can connect to your site, etc?
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Yes.
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No.
Well, Duckster, I would like to know what might be the difference such that you would answer “Yes” to the first part of the query. What exact difference, other than the price, is there? 
As to the speed - no, this is not connected to where you buy the URL from, unless the place where you buy your URL from will also host your new URL on their nameservers. In that case, availability to your site might be impacted by how reliable their nameservers are.
I get my URL hosted through granitecanyon.com . It’s completely free, but it also has occasional outages, and you have to set up your nameserver information all by yourself (definitely not recommended for the novice…)
I ask because I currently have 2 sites on the same server (Note: The sites are identical).
One is: www.nintendovision.com
2nd: www.gamexplain.com
The first one loads a good deal quicker than the 2nd, which doesn’t make any sense to me. (You might have to clear your cashe to see the difference since they use the same images, you also might have to be on 56k, like me). Anyone know why two sites using the same host would have different loading times? Thanks.
Each site came up identically fast for me. I have no idea why you would see what you say you are seeing.
It’s bizarre…Logging in via FTP is slower, there are longer paused in-between actions performed via FTP, and also, when I actually visit the website, it begins to load, then there’s a pause where no data is being transferred, then it resumes. This only happens with the www.gamexplain.com address.
Many, many differences. I speak strictly from personal experience, as I have bought and sold domain names for 5 years, and currently own around 65 .com domain names. I have sampled many registrars running the gamut in price.
[ul]
[li]Some registrars have anywhere from piss poor to non-existant customer service. You can’t ever get through to a live person on the phone.[/li][li]Some registrars still require email authentication for all changes. You have to send a template email, get it returned, and forward it back.[/li][li]Some registrars have beautiful, easy to follow web interfaces designed to be intuitive and user friendly.[/li][li]Some registrars have “safe renew” services ensuring you never lose your domain do to oversight.[/li][li]Some registrars allow wildcard changes to some or all of your domains at one time.[/li][li]Some registrars offer free DNS.[/li][li]Some registrars offer free dynamic DNS.[/li][li]Some registrars offer URL forwarding.[/li][li]Some registrars offer email services.[/li][li]Some registrars are quick to implement name server or billing changes, others painfully slow[/li][li]Some registrars are ridiculously lax on security, and don’t perform backup checks via phone call or even email verification for such crucial changes as name servers, email contacts, phone numbers, etc…[/li][li]Some registrars refuse to send hardcopies of invoices and/or receipts via snail mail.[/li][li]Some registars place all of your domains in essentially different accounts. You can’t even list all of your domains registered with them, and you have to log in separately for each domain.[/li][li]Some registrars offer free ownership transers.[/li][li]Some registrars offer “Spam Shield” services which require entering a graphical keycode before whois information can be retrieved. This prevents spammers from using simple scripts to mine the whois database for email addresses and phone numbers.[/li][/ul]
This is just off the top of my head.
One thing to NOT be concerned with is the it takes your site to load. If you aren’t using a registrar’s DNS services, the speed of your website will not vary from registrar to registrar, merely from host to host, or will depend on the bandwidth and latency of your dedicated line if you do your own DNS.
Duderdude2-
From where I am, a traceroute gives me 8 hops to nintendovision and 13 hops to gamexplain.
This is likely the source of your delay.
If these two sites are indeed on the same server, your host (bbnplanet?) obviously has some routing issues.
Actually, my host is www.e-hosts.net
8 hops to e-hosts as well. It appears that your host’s host is www.bbnplanet.net which leads to www.genuity.com.
My guess is that e-hosts has a few dedicated or colocated servers with genuity, who in turn has the routing issue.
If you aren’t familiar with traceroutes, fire up a dos command prompt and type “tracert domain.com” for each domain.
Or more likely, that e-hosts is hosted by genuity, who own the domain bbnplanet and use it for reverse lookups.