as other have already pointed out, 'speed' can mean many thing.
in those cases i suggest a so-called 'stresstest', that is pushing the server to its limits to see ho many pages it can serve when many browsers are connected and different pages are requested at the same tima.
I normally use Jakarta Jmeter finding it a really effective tool

How to find out if my hosting's speed is good enough?
I am using CentOS with cPanel. On my server, all MySQL databases save at /var/lib/mysql. Now /var is 100% full and MySQL has stopped working. How can I move the databases to a new directory like /home/mysql especially considering that this server is managed with cPanel?
