Your graphic designer is an artist, a trained expert in aesthetics, a master at conveying messages via images and feelings via fonts. He may also be slowing your site down so much that nobody is seeing it.
Artists tend to be heavy on the quality and lighter on the practicality of what they deliver. It's not entirely their fault. Even the most conscientious and experienced designer needs to sell his work and quality sells. Do marketing departments want to see their company advertised in 4K glory or on their mom's 19″ LCD?
Recently I started using SmartSVN running remotely on a Solaris 10 server and displaying on my Windows XP machine via Xming (the free Xserver). I quickly ran into some performance and usability issues which I hope to have solved.
Whether you are dealing with disk I/O in reading the data from the disks, or CPU for compressing or encrypting the data (or both- remember to compress and then encrypt!), or network for transferring the data to a backup server, the added load of a backup on your production servers is unwelcome. For this reason, the period of time during which backups can be made, aka. backup window, may be limited- even severely.
You may say, "It only takes me X hours to do a full backup of everything", but over time backup windows are notorious for becoming too small. Backups are split over multiple days, technologies upgraded, etc. When planning a backup strategy, my approach is to eliminate the backup window altogether- that is do whatever you can to take the backup off the production hardware altogether.
Storage Snapshots are one method for taking the production servers out of the backup equation. By creating a consistent, point in time snapshot on your storage, and mounting it on your backup server, you can backup your data using your backup server's resources while your production servers continue as usual.
When discussing availability of a service, it is common to hear the term "Five Nines" referring to a service being available 99.999% of the time but "Five Nines" are relative. If your time frame is a week, then your service can be unavailable for 6.05 seconds whereas a time frame of a year, allows for a very respectable 5.26 minutes.
In reality, none of those calculations are relevant because no one cares if a service is unavailable for 10 hours, as long as they aren't trying to use it. On the other hand, if you're handling 50,000 transactions per second, 6.05 seconds of unavailability could cost you 302,500 transactions and no one cares if you met your SLA.
This problem is one I've come up against a number of times in the past and recently even more and the issue is orders of magnitude in IT. The larger the volume of business you handle, the less relevant the Five Nines become.
Systems Architects have years of experience in the various parts of the systems they work with. Most probably, they specialize in a specific area area of expertise where they began their careers, but have since expanded their knowledge by learning from their colleagues and from life's lessons. To get to their position, they have proven their ability to analyze and understand the needs and constraints of the business they work in. They are responsible for deciding what technologies will provide the best solutions for a business, how to integrate them with existing systems, and how to retire them when they are obsolete.