How reliable are these internet speed tests?

[cleanxhost]

I use speedtest.net and when you are presented with the home page you get pyramids of locations. In yellow/orange colour is the recommended server to use and here are my results:


If I choose another server, which is in blue and the nearest one to my home, I get:


How is this possible and why is the recommended one really bad?

[slapshotw]

Speed tests are reliable to get a *relative speed* of your connection to how fast it is to a certain server. If you run the speed test once a week (for instance), and do it to the same server each time, you'll get some indication of how fast your connection is that week to in the past (though other factors affect it).

It's not a good indication of the speeds you'll get to other servers on the internet though. With so many internet backbones and datacenters, there's lots of "x factors" with each connection.

And I believe they just recommend based on physical proximity to what they believe your address to be based on your IP. It's possible your ISP routes the traffic somewhere farther away from the slower one and that is why it's slower. It's also possible their server is being slow right now due to problems on their end!