A server ping is a diagnostic tool which checks if your computer can connect to a server. This tool tests to see if a particular host is reachable. A server ping relates to the time it takes for data to be transmitted from your device to a server and back again over ICMP. Note; it requires the ICMP port to be accessible on the server. Obviously you want your ping time to be as short as possible, to reduce access delay time. This is especially relevant for when you are accessing distant remote servers.

Below is how to simulate a ping server check, open your terminal on your computer and run

Ping -c  1 <insert IP address>

The number before your IP address represents the number of ping tests to run, so for example, running the command

Ping -c 3 8.8.8.8

Would run three ping tests on the IP address 8.8.8.8 (Google’s public DNS), and the output will look like this

As you can see from this output, you can see the time each ping took in milliseconds. 

A failed ping test will look like this

See here the difference in percentage loss, and the request timeout rather than ping times.