I hope everyone had a wonderful (and tasty!) Thanksgiving holiday.

This month’s post is directed toward my readers in small IT shops.  When you’re in a small department (or a department of one) it’s a necessity to make the best use of limited resources.

When managing your company’s website, one important area that can often be overlooked is the stability of your website under pressure. I was recently listening to a business newscast’s discussion on the impact of a downed website during this year’s “Black Friday, or more precisely  “Black Friday week”. In the newscast they stated that an average online retailer loses $2 million for every 10 minutes their website is down (yikes!). And while this was talking about large for-profit retailers, a downed site can also be a serious revenue loss for not-for-profits during the holiday giving season.

There are many (complex and pricey) tools available today, but I wanted to share one I had good luck with that will nicely serve the needs of the smaller IT shops out there, in case you haven’t already come across this.

Web Based Testing

Instead of deep diving into technical regex plans and injectors give Load Impact a look.

It runs via your browser, and while the free version does have limitations(it only simulates 25 users) it can provide a number of useful measures.

Sample Output

Running the Stress Test

Performance Graph

Available Metrics

There is of course a paid version, but still, there’s enough information in the free version to get a reasonable sense of how well your site will handle the stress.