Okay i have been around for a bit. And when ever someone offers a deal on hosting people always ask "give us an ip so we can test speed"

well i am looking at hosts, and I asked for an IP but don't know what to do next, how can i check how reliable this will be, and stuff like that?

Like i ping 66.28.242.98 got some ping times?
what does really mean, i mean it's going to be different everytime i do that....

i did a tracert, it took like 20 hops, so now what?

Sorry for my stupidity, but any help would be appreciated. thanks

download pingplotter - http://www.pingplotter.com/download.html

it has nice diagrams that help you see when the connection to a particular site is going slow or having packet loss.

http://webservices.cnet.com/ping/ for a quick test
And there are many programs you can get as well for more detailed stats :)