How to handle lots of site traffic

[DaveJ]

7. I can use my own monitoring methods as well.

I have not released my site yet. When I do I'll use GA as well as my own monitoring methods such as this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2543038/bandwidth-monitoring-in-asp-net

But I need to know that I can immediately scale up the server to provide the speed users expect. I guess I'll just need to start renting a dedicated server. Although I still do now know when, under what circumstances, that should happen. How do I know what the current speed of throughput is versus the potential speed if I had a dedicated server? I'm told I have unlimited bandwidth, but that does not matter to me if it is 10x slower than a different server. Processor speed is also an issue.