How does load testing help your website?
If you suddenly get a flood of visitors and your website goes down, this can be a bad thing. To help prevent this, we offer load testing services where we will use virtual servers to simulate user demand on your website or web server. This is important because we are able to find out where the breaking points of your server are before your potential customers see it and your server goes down. This is important also because it's a way for you to have all of your sites configured in a way where they will be able to withstand the amount of visitors that any type of publicity about your business may generate.
How does load testing work?
In its most basic form, we spin up a variety of virtual servers on web platforms like Amazon, IBM Softlayer, Rackspace, and other cloud providers. We then use our proprietary software to creat bots that mimic human users and then we send these bots to your website. The amount of bots that we send really depends upon the amount of web traffic that you're trying to simulate. If you're trying to simulate a lot of traffic, then you might want to spin up a large amount of bots. If you're trying to simulate a small amount of web traffic, then you may want to spin up a smaller amount of bots. How many you spin up is really up to you and it's dependent upon the amount of traffic that you need to simulate.
How much does this cost?
The cost of load or stress testing really depends again on how many bots you need to spin up for load testing. If you're only spinning up a few bots, then the cost could be pretty low. However, if you're spinning up a lot of bots then the cost could be significantly higher. It really depends on the size and scope of your project. There are also ways to keep the cost down.
What types of load testing software do you use?
Typically we use an external load testing service like
LoadView, otherwise on some other occasions (if the test needs it) we'll use something like Apache's JMeter testing software. There are also a variety of
other stress testing tools available.
If you're not interested in Apache's JMeter software, you can find most information on this
list of JMeter alternatives provided by
Web Hosting Buddy. While JMeter is in fact one of the most popular open-source load testing tools, it may not be the best solution for everyone looking for an
open-source tool.
What's the difference between load and stress testing?
This is quite technical, but we'll try to explain it as simply as possible. Load testing is bascially putting load on a site and measuring how the site reacts with a certain level of load. In this situation, load can be increased or decreased depepnding upon the level of demand that you want to simulate. Stress testing, on the other hand, is the process of applying demand to a website or web server until it breaks. This distinction is important because not every web server will break at the same level of demand, so it's imporant to be able to undestand what the limits of your web server are and then adjust accordingly (which is also referred to as capacity planning).