How to measure geographical access time of a web hosting?

Question

I'm building a website targeted for US visitors; and this question came up while shopping around for reliable web hosting there. Since I'm located in the UK, a simple "ping" wouldn't represent the average access time from a US visitor's point of view -which is critical, since a new visitor spends around 3 seconds to evaluate a website.

How to measure the average access time needed to get the full response, from a US visitor's point of view?

Answer 1

SiteUptime.com might be useful for you. They maintain data centers around the globe and offer simple inexpensive checks that also include an average access time (though really only for one page).

If you need more... well.. you could get el-cheapo shared hosting in a separate data center and do the code yourself.