How to Test the Connection Speed of a Server?

If you serve normal webpages from your server (with no video content and/or static files served from a CDN), then for 20 concurrent website visitors, you’ll not have more than 100Mbps bandwidth (for a dedicated server). These days, it is common to have servers with 1Gbps to 10Gbps network speed. Whether the bandwidth becomes the bottleneck of in-general site speed, you can guess with tools such GTMetrix, WebPageTest.org etc sites. Unless you are facing a lot of traffic with a high number of concurrent users, generally you need not bother about speed.

We have seen dedicated servers with only 90Mbps speed to perform better than virtual servers with 3-4 Gbps connection. May be because the hardware and the connection are dedicated. This a dedicated server running WordPress with near 1Gbps speed on a test (without any whole site caching service):

By making the front end lighter, it will load within 2 seconds. Probably most of you these days will spend money behind whole site caching, geo DNS etc to decrease the TTFB. Still, we tend to recommend a server with 500Mbps upload and download speed.

Commonly, the budget is the main restrictive factor.

Test the Connection Speed of a Server

SSH into your server. Run the following commands:

You’ll receive output like this one:

This is another example of the output:

Another way to test is to use iperf tool:

If SPEED is your need and your budget is limited, then the choice of dedicated server hosts is different from HARDWARE SPEC with a limited budget. Because of the restricted budget, there will be some compromises yet they will not affect when the number of visitors is low.