How to run your own speed test server with Speedtest.net Mini

Speedtest.net is one of the most popular internet speed tests. It is very helpful if you want to determine your Internet download and upload speed. They have a mini version of the application – Speedtest.net Mini which can be installed locally to do basic tests and check the upload and download speed of your server.

In this blog article we will install the self hosted version of Speedtest.net on a CentOS 7 VPS with Apache web server and PHP. The installation is very simple and fast.

First of all. log in to your server as user root and make sure that all packages are up to date

yum -y update

Speedtest.net Mini is can run with all major web servers. In our case we will use Apache web server with PHP. So let’s install Apache and PHP on our CentOS 7 machine

yum install httpd

Start the Apache web server and enable it to start at boot

systemctl start httpd

Install PHP and few PHP modules

yum install php php-mysql php-gd php-mcrypt

Go to their official website and download the Speedtet.net Mini Server. Please note that you need to create an account and login to be able to download the archive

wget http://c.speedtest.net/mini/mini.zip

Unzip the downloaded zip archive to the Apache document root directory

yum -y install unzip
unzip mini.zip -d /var/www/html/

To find Apache’s document root directory execute the following command

grep -i "^documentroot" /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html"

As we can see in the output a document root directory is /var/www/html

There are several index files in the SpeedTest Mini directory. Since we will use Apache and PHP we need to rename the ‘index-php.html’ file

cd /var/www/html/mini/
mv index-php.html index.html

If you want to update your existing SpeedTest Mini installation, you just need to download the latest release from their official website and unpack the zip packages over the existing files in ‘/var/www/html/mini’. It is recommended to do the update every few months.

Finally, open your favorite web browser and point it to http://yourdomain.com/mini and start testing your server speed.

Of course you don’t have to do any of this if you use one of our Linux VPS Hosting services, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to install SpeedTest Mini for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.

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