Ping test finally available in limited regions

The_Moose

A long requested feature to test the latency of a data center, before taking the big step to buy a server instance has finally been implemented. In fact, the entire data center page has been redesigned, as well as a few parts of our main website, check it out here: https://www.99stack.com/company/regions.

Whats new

Long time users might recognize the new UI, which is based on an older layout we used to have a few years ago, but with some major updates. This new layout is designed more like a list/table and shows region ID plus the available features using larger colored icons. Green for available and black for not available.

In addition to this, data centers are properly sorted by country and city, not just country, in a more space saving layout that also looks more compact. For each datacenter, you can click anywhere on the table and a modal will open up, showing additional features and information.

Ping test

About half of the data centers now has an ip address to an idle server instance, which you can use for ping test. The plan is to add this feature in all regions, but not only that, where available, there's also gonna be test files to download, instructions on additional tools that can be used for testing which provides more information and eventually IPv6 support.

Frederik_Madsen

Now that's a great update! 👍️

Finally an affordable and fast way to test out latency in advance.

Marco_Weiss

Great update! is this available via API too?

pingu

Marco_Weiss You can access it via the ping_ip field when calling /v1.2/region/list. However, bear in mind that this is only temporary, a quick way to allow access to this information by the main website, which collects it's information directly from the API as well.

Expect future name changes of this field, however the function list regions will always have this information. Best you can do for now is to look for anything that matches an ip address within the response. And you shall find the information no matter what the field name might be.

Right now, the field also simply shows the ip address only, this will be changed to json in the future, an array with key - value fields as there may be links to test files you can download, IPv6 and other information about the data center.

Josef

That's a huge time and money saver. Thanks for finally adding this. 👍️

Pepe_The_Frog

Feels good man, especially the availability via API, you don't see that in most places.

I'm gonna write a script that test latency in every single region and ranks them depending on speed.

AndrewLowrance

Pepe_The_Frog How's it going, would love to borrow it or if you shared some results.

Pepe_The_Frog

AndrewLowrance Here's the script I use, in PHP:

$regions = file_get_contents('https://api.99stack.com/v1.2/region/list');
foreach (json_decode($regions, true) as $id => $region) {
    echo ping($region['ping_ip', 3]);
}

function ping($host, $timeout = 1) {
    /* ICMP ping packet with a pre-calculated checksum */
    $package = "\x08\x00\x7d\x4b\x00\x00\x00\x00PingHost";
    $socket  = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_RAW, 1);
    socket_set_option($socket, SOL_SOCKET, SO_RCVTIMEO, array('sec' => $timeout, 'usec' => 0));
    socket_connect($socket, $host, null);
    $ts = microtime(true);
    socket_send($socket, $package, strLen($package), 0);
    if (socket_read($socket, 255)) {
        $result = microtime(true) - $ts;
    } else {
        $result = false;
    }
    socket_close($socket);
    return $result;
}

Be patient, every region takes a few seconds to test, and the score will obviously be from wherever this script is running from. I suggest you run it locally or from an instance that is close to where your visitors may be.

AndrewLowrance

Pepe_The_Frog Thanks, that helps a lot!

Mickey

Thank you @Pepe_The_Frog, your script works great.