Say you want to test your app or benchmark hardware you just bought then first thing you need to do is to add it into the network, even local network will do. If you are serious about testing hardware then you may need to test at various RTT/latency values to evaluate the experience of your customers from various locations across the world. If you plan to test the hardware then I suggest running a simple and no-frills http server on your hardware like python single threaded server. Using scp for testing is not a good idea since openssh itself had some app level congestion controlling mechanisms.