One of my clients has employees across the country at their clients’ offices, and sometimes users at a given location report that their connection to the company web site is slow. To assist with troubleshooting, I usually have them first run a bandwidth speed test at SpeakEasy and/or SpeedTest.net. I have them choose a test server closest to where the company web site is hosted (in this case, Chicago). Several times in the past the speed tests would demonstrate a slow connection, and we’d then be able to start troubleshooting.

That doesn’t always resolve the issue, though — sometimes the speed tests would be fine, but access to the site would still be slow (again, only for those locations). I recently found another free traceroute tool to help diagnose connection issues between the user and the web site. I prefer web-based tools since oftentimes the user doesn’t have rights to install desktop bandwidth monitoring tools.

I’ve thought about putting a speed test on our web server itself. You can actually host SpeedTest.net’s speed test for $400/year, or Visualware’s MySpeed speed test for $250/year.

I found one or two free tests that you can seemingly host, but they were java source code & required linux. I suppose making a very simple Flash-based speed test wouldn’t be too hard — download some uncompressible files (like ZIPs, JPGs, MP3s) from the web site and measure how long it took to download them, then display the results. For the upload test, generate some data, POST it to the server, and measure that upload time (either on the client and/or the server). Or I guess one could do the same thing using AJAX, too, maybe.