TIPS & TRICKS 1

SPEEDTEST.NET

Today I'm going to briefly talk about a little website that you can use to track your ISP's (Internet Service Provider) performance and make sure they're delivering the product and speed they said they would when you paid for it.

The website is called http://www.speedtest.net



Its completely free of any spyware, or malware and doesn't need to install anything to your computer in order to run the quick test that it does.

Basically the way this works is you click the "Begin Test" button and speedtest.net will run a series of 3 tests.

The first will test your ping, the amount of time it takes for your computer to send information to a destination computer and for that computer to respond acknowledging that the information was received. The lower this number is to 0, the better.

The second test will determine your current download speed:



Typically ISP's offer a standard package between 2-5 MB/second, something midrange up to 10-15 MB/second, and finally a speed package which can go as high as 100 MB/second. This is where you're going to find out whether or not your ISP is living up to its promise.

The third test will determine your current upload speed:



Upload speed is important if you plan on doing live video streams or hosting a lot of large files. I'll talk about doing live video streams in another blog. The higher the number here the better.

After the tests have run you're able to share the results with the world via the link Speed Test provides you:



You can also compare your results to the rest of the world for both your download and upload speeds:





Then if you like you can compare your results to your Country and State/Province, and against other users within your ISP:



Finally, if you've run multiple speed tests it will keep your test history so that you can compare it against yourself:



In closing www.speedtest.net is a great tool that I find myself using almost everyday. Hopefully you'll find it useful as well!

- Maurice


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