HACKER Q&A
📣 LLcolD

How to test website from different locations?


Is there a way to see if my website/service is accessible from different countries?

At the moment I fire up VPN, open browser in incognito mode, go to URL click link or two, take a screenshot as proof that web is up and running and then I move to the next one.

There must be a better way to do that. Is there a service for this? I was thinking about some automation maybe, but I lack selenium skills and I don't know how to activate VPN over the script.

  👤 mtmail Accepted Answer ✓
There's services specialized in crawling + VPN. Often used to crawl shopping websites or Google result pages. One example is https://www.scrapingbee.com and you select the country https://www.scrapingbee.com/documentation/country_codes/ They can do screenshots, too.

If the concern is uptime there's a couple of service that also do regular screenshots and alerts when the website is slow or unresponsive. https://www.debugbear.com/ for example.

For a super quick check (every couple of months I need this) I usually use https://www.webpagetest.org/ Under 'advanced configuration' there's a dropdown of locations around the world. I gives a screenshot but not access to the full HTML.

👤 seedless-sensat
Datadog Synthetics is nice, and reports great telemetry. It supports like 20 locations: https://docs.datadoghq.com/synthetics/
👤 lolovaldez
bunny.net has a nice global latency test. Does not provide screenshots but gives you a nice overall of how fast the site is getting serve world wide.

https://tools.bunny.net/latency-test

👤 dieselgate
You can spoof the useragent and IP address as well, that's typically how I manage Geo testing at work.
👤 oriettaxx
uh, many: I've intensively used these two:

https://www.webpagetest.org

https://tools.pingdom.com