If you just purchased a new VPS, VDS, Dedicated server, or Colocation services, and you go to test your network speed only to find out it's either slow on both upload and download, or slow on only one, and you're not getting your purchased speed, please check below.
Please also follow these directions if you are experiencing issues with speed before you open a ticket. Chances are, in this scenario, the issue is not your network with us, but something software related, or outside of our datacenter, like your upline ISP or who you are connecting to. Please check these instructions first to confirm your server is fine, and hardware is fine, and the port/network with us is fine, before opening a ticket.
To test the network speed of your server, regardless of whether you have 1G, 10G, or more speed with us, please don't use speedtest.net! It does not work, and is not designed, no matter how much they try to sell the idea, for 1G plus connections! Most speedtest.net servers are overloaded with people testing against them, as well they are on low-end hardware not designed for what they throw at them.
To truly test your speed, please use iperf. You can find many iperf and iperf3 open servers out there to test against, as well if we have issues inside the datacenter, we can turn up an iperf server for you to test against so you can rule out hardware and network connections. Below we provide a basic iperf command to test against Cloudflare's iperf server. We use this server to test up to 40G connections coming out of the DC.
iperf -c cloudflare.com -p 443 -P 10
The uppercase "P" means Parallel, which allows you to run simultaneous testers against the server. The more "Parallel"s you do, the faster it can go - 20 to 40 is best for 10G speed tests. We've found that 1G speed tests don't max out your port unless you do 10 or more parallel's, so doing just a single test with no parallel's won't max out a 1G or above port!
If you can successfully max out your port using iperf against cloudflare, then there is nothing wrong with the internet going to your server; any issues you face are outside of your server and our datacenter.
Speed issues or Latency Issues
If you are experiencing speed issues, whether or not iperf speedtest gives full speed or not, we cannot help you diagnose the issue without proper documentation for the issue. What we need from you below, without this information, we cannot help diagnose the issue:
- Iperf speedtest results from above
- Full details of where the speed issue is going to and coming from and how the issue arises
- Traceroute from your server with us to the destination
- Traceroute from the destination back to your server with us
- Public IP address of the destination, so we can test
- It would be beneficial if, at the destination location, you could spin up an iperf server to test your server with us against, and then the opposite direction, so we have full directional speed calculations
To spin up an iperf server please install iperf then run this command:
iperf -s
This will turn on an iperf server, then from your other server you can test against it
iperf -c yourpublicip
