What access do you have? What I mean is, are you the sysadmin (presumably not) or just a user of your web host whose given you a shell account, and you want to verify his claims on the hardware
Also, can you sit in front of the computer (console) or do you only have a shell account?
No I only have access via FTP and MySQL (phpMyAdmin) accounts. Not any ssh I have PHP/HTTP/MySQL running on the server and yes I want to verify the hardware
Another option would be, if you can put cgi's or your own php apps on the server, you could use that to query a command line application for the server information. Depending on the type of unix it is, the commands would be different.