There are numerous web-services like Speedtest.net which allow users to simply open a web-browser and benchmark their internet connections upload and download throughput with ease. However, if you need something similar for your server which does not have an graphical interface here are a few options to check network throughput from terminal/console. One can simply check download speed by using something like the command below at the terminal,

wget --output-document=/dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip

But for a thorough check with option for outputting beautiful shareable badge like the one on the right, we will use the "Speedtest" command-line utility as shown below.