The Virgin Media Broadband Speed Test started out as an experiment and a tool for personal use in order to see exactly how fast my home broadband connection was in terms of raw download speed.
The site works by downloading an 11MB image file directly from Virgin Media's servers and timing the operation using JavaScript, allowing it to calculate the overall throughput for the transfer and give the answer as a measure of broadband speed.
After adding Google Analytics to the site I discovered that it was seeing over two hundred visitors a day, and so it was given it's own domain. The site continues to attract hundreds of visitors per day and earns a healty amount each month through advertising revenue using Google AdSense.