I was wondering if anyone has any simple test procedures to check a web host's servers as far as download time and ping - traceroute goes.
I was tinking of getting a sample url from one of the web host's clients and time the download of a 100K page from each to compare web hosts - just to see if some are really slow or not (I'm on a 56k isp connection so my download is always slow but I mean relatively slow).
Does the ping time matter? I checked one site I thought would be slow and it had a 2 ms ping time whereas a big host was 66 ms - should this matter?

http://www.hexillion.com/utilities/

ping time is not the deciding factor and should not be used to test a server performance.

You can try netcraft.com (http://www.netcraft.com) to moniter the uptime of a host.

NetMechanic has a free test that tests servers over an 8 hour period for downloading a notional 10K file, then gives the server a relative ranking compared to a couple of thousand other servers.