Enter a host name or an IP address and choose IPv4 or IPv6. We send a few ICMP echo requests from our server and show whether the host answers, how fast, and how many packets were lost.
The host you enter is sent to Upzilla's testing server, which pings it and returns the result. It is not stored.
Ping sends a small ICMP "echo request" to a host and waits for the "echo reply". Two things come back: whether the host answered at all, and how long the round trip took. Repeated a few times, that gives the three numbers that describe a network path — latency (how long), packet loss (how often nothing comes back) and jitter (how much the time varies from one packet to the next).
Under 50 ms feels instant. 100–200 ms is noticeable in calls and games. Mostly a matter of distance: light takes time.
Should be 0%. Even 1–2% hurts: lost packets are resent, and everything built on the connection slows down.
Uneven times mean a congested or unstable link. It matters most for voice, video and anything real-time.
How many router hops the reply had left. It starts at 64, 128 or 255, so it hints at the distance and the system.
A host with both an A and an AAAA record has two separate addresses, reached over two separate networks. They can differ in route, in speed and in whether they work at all — a server that answers on IPv4 can be unreachable over IPv6 because of a firewall rule nobody tested. Choose the protocol explicitly to test each path: IPv4 uses ICMP, IPv6 uses ICMPv6 (the command-line equivalents are ping -4 and ping -6). "Automatic" tests whichever address the name resolves to first.
The test runs from our server, not from your computer. That is the point: it shows whether the host is reachable from the internet, which is what your visitors experience, and it works even when your own network is the thing that is broken. For the path from your own machine, run ping in a terminal.
No reply does not always mean the host is down. Ping is easy to block, and many networks do: cloud firewalls drop ICMP by default, some hosting providers rate-limit it, and a few large sites ignore it entirely. A web server can serve pages perfectly while every ping to it times out. Treat a failed ping as a reason to check the real service — load the site, test the port — rather than as proof of an outage. A successful ping, in turn, proves only that the machine is on the network: the application on it may still be down.
Within the same country, 10–40 ms is typical. Across a continent 40–100 ms, between continents 100–250 ms. What counts as good depends on the distance — but times that jump around or include lost packets are a problem at any distance.
The server or a firewall in front of it is dropping ICMP echo requests. That is a deliberate setting on many networks and does not affect web traffic.
They test two different addresses and two different routes to the same host. IPv4 ping uses ICMP, IPv6 ping uses ICMPv6. A host can answer one and not the other.
From Upzilla's testing server, so the result shows how the host looks from the internet rather than from your own connection.
This is one test, now. Monitoring repeats it every minute from several places, keeps the history and tells you when the answer changes.
Upzilla pings your servers every minute from several locations and alerts you by email, Slack or Telegram the moment one stops answering. 10 monitors free.