Pre-requisites

• A Webdock cloud instance (a distro that Webdock supports)
• You have SSH access to your VPS.

Running speed tests

We have seen many users installing the speedtest-cli apt package to run speed tests. But that package is quite outdated and most often outputs inaccurate results. To fix this you can install the CLI provided by Ookla.

Head over to the Ookla CLI page and install it on your server based on your server’s operating system.

Then run the below command and hit yes to the prompts. Right after that, the speed test begins.

$ speedtest

By default, the closest test server will be chosen. Sometimes speedtest can be pretty bad at picking the closest server and may pick something which is actually quite far away.

If you want you can list what speedtest thinks are the closest servers and check that. Simply run the speedtest command with the -L flag to view the closest servers.

$ speedtest -L

The output will be similar to this:

Closest servers:

    ID  Name                           Location             Country
==============================================================================
 22669  Elisa Oyj                      Helsinki             Finland
 39547  BlufVPN                        Helsinki             Finland
 31122  RETN                           Helsinki             Finland
 25362  Uganda Hosting Limited         Helsinki             Finland
 27828  Cinia Oy                       Helsinki             Finland
 14928  Telia                          Helsinki             Finland
 14164  DNA Welho Oy                   Helsinki             Finland
 32643  Suomi Communications Oy        Espoo                Finland
 50126  lifehost360.com OÜ             Tuusula              Finland
 17372  Telia Eesti AS                 Tallinn              Estonia

Then you can run the speed test by selecting a specific speed test server by its ID. For example:

$ speedtest --server-id 39547

For other flags, you can see the help section of the speedtest package (run speedtest -h to view help information).

Recommended speedtest servers

During testing, we have found a few reliable test servers that give accurate speed test results. We recommend running speed tests using these test server IDs. Depending on where your VPS is physically located:

North America:

$ speedtest --server-id 38242
$ speedtest --server-id 13030
$ speedtest --server-id 3025

Finland:

$ speedtest --server-id 25362
$ speedtest --server-id 14928
$ speedtest --server-id 27828​​​​

An alternative

As an alternative, you can also run the speed tests using iperf.

Execute the below command:

$ curl -sL yabs.sh | bash -s -- -fg

The script runs speed tests against multiple speed test servers across the globe.

The above command is strictly limited to network speed tests. Have a look at this GitHub repo if you want to run CPU, disk r/w tests, and other things.

Conclusion

This article outlined instructions on how to run network speed tests and get accurate test results.