How reliable is Speedtest.net?

I haven't used pingtest, but I have used and know that speedtest is reliable, they are good websites for checking your internet speeds and whatnot. Good to get an idea of what you're dealing with. Just make sure you select the right location settings.

They are good for rough estimates of download speed. But nothing beats doing a realworld download of some large file and measuring that. You generally should choose a location closest to you and you should run the test a number of times to get an average. It's also useful to use multiple speed tests.

Here's some others I've used at various times:

http://www.dslreports.com/stest

http://reviews.cnet.com/7004-7254_7-0.html

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

http://www.auditmypc.com/internet-speed-test.asp

http://www.testmy.net/tools/test/d_load.php

What I like about Speedtest.net is that it saves the results of all of your tests (I think in a cookie) and then you can graph them. A couple of months ago we were having weird network problems, and couldn't really decide if it was a real problem, and then I popped up my graph of tests and it was obvious that our network speeds had driven off a cliff a few weeks before. Manually pulling our dsl boards fixed the problem.

It may not be the most sophisticated tool around, but it does the job!