How does a novice benchmark the speed of their hosted site?

Benchmarking is a complicated subject, and highly application-dependent. If you want to get semi-real numbers you have to build realistic usage scenarios. I'm a fan of extracting scenarios from real-world log files. I separate my tests into two threads: the load generators, and the target scenario. The load generators are background traffic, requests that I'm not tracking.

As far as implementing the benchmark, I'm a fan of tsung: http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/, but if you want something simple, just use ab: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/prog... or httperf: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/.... Peepcode makes an excellent screencast on how to benchmark with httperf: http://peepcode.com/products/benchmar...

If you just want a simple, synthetic benchmark, just point ab or httperf at your server. Keep in mind, though, that the numbers you get back won't be realistic since many applications have subtle performance characteristics. Requests to page A makes loading Page B slow, but Page C runs fast regardless. Those sorts of things.

bottom line for synthetic benchmark: ab -c 10 -n 1000 http://mydomain.com/