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APIContext provides a network of HTTPbin servers to use as free test API servers. These can be called from a variety of locations to measure overall performance from many locations without any security or setup.


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How HTTPbin works

Measuring performance from different regions and different clouds is core to what we do and providing developers, managers and product owners with the tools needed to understand what the impact of different locations and clouds is critical.  To help people with this information we’ve set up a network of HTTPbin servers for developers to use to test against.

In each of the seven current Google Cloud regions, we have set up a small f1-micro VM running the HTTPbin API service. They are set up within a shared VPC network, which is fronted by the Google Cloud Load Balancer. They also each have an external IP address allocated, so they may be accessed directly.

The external IPs for the Load Balancer and the VMs were assigned to DNS records for both apimetrics.xyz and api.expert – the diagram only shows the api.expert domains, the naming pattern is the same for both. We are using Google Cloud DNS for the nameservers, with the TTL of each record set to 24 hours to allow caching for a reasonable period of time.

free test api online httpbin

How to use the free test API

The easiest way to take advantage of the free test APIs is through a test account with APImetrics – when you create a first test we pre-populate the form with a sample HTTPbin call – but you can just use the external IP and DNS names to hit them direct yourself.

Example data

We use the data to generate our maps of Cloud Data Center Latency which can be seen here, which shows the differences in performance between different clouds and the Google network.

Testing Your Own APIs

APIContext provides a complete set of test tools to test the performance and functionality of individual calls and workflows with a simple user interface that even lets you test locally through the browser.

Whatever your API testing needs, we have tools and services to help.


API Test Online


Create a free APIContext Trial Account – No Credit Card Needed to use our free test APIs

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