- Upload
- How fast you can push data out, measured over four connections at once to
the nearest Cloudflare edge. This reads lower than Speedtest on purpose.
Speedtest servers are often hosted by your own ISP, so they measure the line
to your provider's doorstep. This measures a real internet destination —
further away, and harder. For hosting, it's the more useful of the two. We
also stop at a data cap, so on a fast line this is a floor, not a ceiling.
- Ping
- Round trip to that same edge. Jitter is how much it wobbles, and steadiness
matters more than speed — a rock-solid 40 ms plays better than a 20 ms that
jumps around.
- Under load
- The one that decides hosting. We ping while saturating your upload,
because that's what hosting does: the game pushes to everyone at once. Under
60 ms of added delay is fine. Over 150 ms and the game stutters for everyone
else no matter how good your idle ping looks. This is bufferbloat, and no
plan speed ever tells you about it.
- Provider
- The network your traffic actually enters, read from the connection itself.
That's the registered operator, which isn't always the brand on your bill.
A browser can time HTTP requests but can't measure UDP packet loss the way a game
engine does. Treat all of this as a strong indicator, not a netgraph.