US Ping Test

US Ping Test: Check a Website from the United States

Enter the address of a website and this tool checks it from a server in New York, United States. In a few seconds you see whether the site is online for visitors in the USA, how long it took to answer, and what status code it returned. It is a quick way to test a site from an American location when your own connection is in another country.

What the tool measures

The check is an HTTP(S) request, the same kind of request that a browser makes when it opens the page. It is not an ICMP ping of the classic kind, so it works for any website, even when the server does not answer ICMP. The result has four lines:

• Ping Server: where the check was made (United States, New York).
• Status: Online when the site answered with HTTP status 200, Offline when it did not.
• Response time: the total time of the request in milliseconds.
• Response status code: the code of the final answer (200, 403, 404, 500, 503 and so on), or the error message when there was no answer at all.

Response time: what it includes

A website ping counts everything between the request and the end of the answer: finding the address of the site (DNS), connecting, the secure HTTPS handshake, any redirects, the work of the web server and the download of the page. That is why it is longer than a classic ICMP ping, which only shows the round trip of one small packet, and why it is close to what a visitor feels. As a rule of thumb, a site hosted in the USA often answers in a few hundred milliseconds or less from New York, while a server on another continent adds the delay of the ocean crossing several times over (the DNS, connection and HTTPS steps each travel the distance). A very slow answer, or none at all, is worth a second look.

Why test from the US

• To see what American visitors get from a site that is hosted elsewhere, for example in Europe or Asia.
• To check whether a site, a CDN or a firewall blocks or slows traffic from the USA.
• To compare with a check from your own location: if the site is fast at home and slow from New York, the distance or the routing is the cause.
• To find out whether a site that "does not open for me" is down for everyone or only for you.
• To test a new server, a DNS change or an SSL certificate from the outside.

How to read the status codes

• 200: the page was delivered, the site is online.
• 301, 302: redirects. The tool follows up to 15 of them, checks every address on the way and reports the final answer.
• 403: access is forbidden; the site, a firewall or a bot protection may be refusing American requests or requests from a server.
• 404: the page does not exist at this address.
• 500, 502, 503, 504: the server has a problem or is overloaded; try again in a minute.
• No code and an error message: the connection failed, the name could not be resolved, the certificate is not valid or the site did not answer within the time limit.

Limitations

• One location. The check is made from one server in New York. It says nothing about other countries or other American cities; use a check from another place to compare.
• One request. The result is a single measurement. The response time changes from second to second, so repeat the test a few times before drawing a conclusion.
• Time limit. A site that does not answer in about 10 seconds is reported as Offline with the error.
• Public addresses only. Localhost, private and reserved addresses are not checked, and of the ports only 80, 443, 8080 and 8443 are available.
• Only status 200 is Online. A site that answers with another code is shown as Offline even though a server is there; look at the status code line to see what it said.
• Protection against bots. Some sites answer a server with a "checking your browser" page or with code 403 or 503. That shows how the site treats this check, not necessarily how it treats people.
• The certificate is verified. A site with an expired or wrong HTTPS certificate fails the check.

For more details use the TTFB checker (time to the first byte), the DNS lookup and the HTTP status codes reference.