The benefits of distributed load test centers can be seen as an invaluable tool for e-businesses that serve local, regional, national, and global audiences. The testing network helps ensure application and website users have a smooth browsing and purchasing experience. It’s a well-established principle that load times have a direct correlation with conversion rates: faster sites mean higher sales, slower sites mean lost sales. Amazon found that a 100ms load time increase led to a 1 percent sales decline.
The obvious solution of adding more server power to chop off load time only helps to a point, as the physical distance between the hosting server and the end user also plays a role in load times. Distributed load testing centers allow businesses to test application performance from all over the planet.
Location, Location, Location
The real estate mantra “location, location, location” also reigns when it comes to hosting and Content Delivery Network server geography. Not all users will access the site from the same geographical location. Barring infrastructure bandwidth limitations, the general rule is that the closer the site visitor is to the server hosting a website or an application, the faster the service will load. The location-relevance concept means site visitors in one region may have a quick-running experience while another region experiences substantial lag. If your business is trying to test service performance, it can only gauge those measurements from locations where it has a physical presence.
Testing by Geography
A business that hosts its site in Chicago and operates out of New York will have no idea if Los Angeles visitors are having a smooth experience. Distributed load testing services solve this problem by providing access to a network of hundreds of servers across the globe. Apica’s own load testing network sports 209 monitoring stations within more than 50 load clusters across 200 cities around the world. Businesses can utilize any of the load testing clusters relevant to their audience to determine how well their existing infrastructure serves their audience, and where they could benefit most from adding hosting redundancies. A regional-serving business out of Boston may opt to use the New England-based testing clusters only, whereas an international business out of San Francisco may opt to use clusters across North America, Asia, and Europe. The system can be scaled to meet your company’s individual needs.
Immense Real-World Traffic Testing Capabilities
Distributed load testing opens up the possibility of testing application infrastructure with immense amounts of traffic that can’t be replicated from a single testing location. Additionally, the ability to capitalize on testing locations from multiple geographical regions creates load tests that behave more like real-world use cases than those from a single location. For example, the Apica network can push an application test that uses more than 30 Gbps of bandwidth and simulates more than 2 million concurrent users. This provides data that more accurately represents user experiences when compared to single-origin tests.
When asked, one of Apica’s clients said he specifically chose Apica’s load testing services over the competition because of their distributed load test center network. The real-world-style test data makes it easier for businesses to make the best possible decisions about their application hosting infrastructure, saving money and improving the user experience simultaneously. Check out Apica’s distributed load testing network locations for yourself, and see how the testing network can help your business provide a better online platform.
