Question

How to find the region with the lowest ping?

I’ve taken to using services like Digital Ocean for my private computing needs as well as my more professional computing needs, for instance spinning up a droplet to use as a game server or mumble server. However for this to work as well as possible I need to know what regions offers the lowest ping/roundtrip to my connection and the connection of my friends. I could of course deploy one in each of the possible regions myself and do a benchmark, but I’d rather not pay for the time if I don’t have to. So does digital ocean offer any kind of benchmarking or official servers to find these kind of statistics?


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Accepted Answer

Try 3 or 5 rounds to get a winner. Here from the city I live in Brazil, nyc1 won.

{
    curl -w "%{url_effective};%{time_connect}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://speedtest-nyc1.digitalocean.com/
    curl -w "%{url_effective};%{time_connect}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://speedtest-nyc2.digitalocean.com/
    curl -w "%{url_effective};%{time_connect}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://speedtest-nyc3.digitalocean.com/
    curl -w "%{url_effective};%{time_connect}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://speedtest-ams2.digitalocean.com/
    curl -w "%{url_effective};%{time_connect}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://speedtest-ams3.digitalocean.com/
    curl -w "%{url_effective};%{time_connect}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://speedtest-sfo1.digitalocean.com/
    curl -w "%{url_effective};%{time_connect}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://speedtest-sfo2.digitalocean.com/
    curl -w "%{url_effective};%{time_connect}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://speedtest-sgp1.digitalocean.com/
    curl -w "%{url_effective};%{time_connect}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://speedtest-lon1.digitalocean.com/
    curl -w "%{url_effective};%{time_connect}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://speedtest-fra1.digitalocean.com/
    curl -w "%{url_effective};%{time_connect}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://speedtest-tor1.digitalocean.com/
    curl -w "%{url_effective};%{time_connect}\n" -o /dev/null -s http://speedtest-blr1.digitalocean.com/
} | sort -t';' -k2

Bye

Simply ping the hostnames available on http://speedtest-tor1.digitalocean.com/

How about if I want to find location with lowest ping to a 3rd party server. Digital ocean has to have proper looking glass interface to quickly evaluate not only bandwidth, but also pings and trace-routes.

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