How to Perform a Ping Test in Windows, Mac OS, and Linux

How to Perform a Ping test in Windows

Windows 7 and older

• Click on the “Start” menu and type “cmd” into the search field (where it says “Search programs and files” or “Start search”).
• Push the Enter key on your keyboard. A DOS prompt window will open up.
• Type the following command in the command window and press ‘Enter’:

ping yourdmain.tld

(remember to replace yourdomain.tld with your actual domain name)

• The output will look similar to the following:

$ ping -c 5 yourdomain.tld
PING yourdomain.tld (89.45.251.10): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 89.45.251.10: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=11.632 ms
64 bytes from 89.45.251.10: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=11.726 ms
64 bytes from 89.45.251.10: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=10.683 ms
64 bytes from 89.45.251.10: icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=9.674 ms
64 bytes from 89.45.251.10: icmp_seq=4 ttl=56 time=11.127 ms

--- yourdomain.tld statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 9.674/10.968/11.726/0.748 ms 

• If you noticed in the example above, we used the attribute “–c“. This limits the number of ping requests to 5.
• The ping request by default is constantly recurring until the user presses CTRL + C, hence the utility of this attribute.

Windows 8.x and newer

• Use the search window, type command prompt and click on the Command Prompt result.
• Type the following command in the command window and press ‘Enter’:

ping yourdmain.tld

(remember to replace yourdomain.tld with your actual domain name)

• On Mac OS X, you will need to navigate to the Applications folder > Utilities > and then open the ‘Network Utility‘ application.
• Once the Network Utility is running, click on the ‘Ping’ tab and specify a domain or IP address to check. The default of ‘Send only 10 pings’ will be fine.
• Click on the ‘Ping’ button to start the ping test.

• Open a Terminal window using Ctrl + Alt + T.  Simply hold all three keys at the same time, and a terminal window will open.
• In the new terminal window, type the following command and press ‘Enter’:

ping -t 10 yourdomain.tld

(remember to replace yourdomain.tld with your actual domain name)

In conclusion, the ping command is a wide-spread and easy-to-use tool. It can come in handy for quick host availability check. However, watch out for certain hosts that prohibit its use due to its vulnerability.