What are the best ways to measure the speed of your server?
What are the best ways to estimate how fast your site will load and find the fastest host, before signing up for a hosting company?

Some options I see are:
1. pinging or running traceroutes to the site from several locations (Note that most of my viewers will be in Western US)
2. checking server load
3. checking specs of machine that it will be hosted on
4. checking speed of similar sites
5. ftp'ing files from various locations
6. checking bandwdith provider/site location
7. active BGP vs. no active BGP

Which factors usually have the greatest influence on the speed a site loads? For a static page? For a dynamic page? If you have a high-quality server that is not overloaded?

Here is what I have observed:

The overall speed is the sum of various parts. One weak link can destroy the speed of the fastest server or the best network.

Pinging correlates well with load time. The sites that load the fastest for me usually have low ping times and the slowest sites have high ping times. When my site has network problems and becomes very slow, the ping times also become slow.

Sever load does not make much difference unless it is high. Loads of 0.00 and 0.50 all function about the same. If the load is more than 10 than everything becomes ridicuously slow. My message board barely functions at all at this load. Basic operations produce 'internal server error's.

I have found that the machine makes little difference in terms of speed. Perhaps I have not been on any especially slow machines, but my site seems to load at about the same speed on a 467MHZ PIII with 256k ram as a 850MHZ PIII with 512k RAM. I suppose the machine would be more important if you are hosting multiple accounts and/or have a high server load. Perhaps the network is my weak link, not the sever.

Checking the speed of similar sites can be useful, but it is difficult to find similar sites. Some hosts are reluctant to give out information about the sites they host, and there are many unknown factors such as type of pages and load of server.

FTP'ing from various locations can be helpful to measure transfer speed and burst speed, but in my observations it has not been a good measure of how fast pages load. Perhaps I do not have extremely files of the type that I am testing with FTP's

I am just starting to learn about bandwidth provider, site location, and active BGP. I do not know how much they affect speed.