DDoS attacks are still presenting a major threat for online businesses and entrepreneurs who think they won’t be affected. To minimize the risks of such an attack, you should make sure your web project can withstand sudden changes in traffic loads and continue operating without any problems.

We recommend conducting your own digital perimeter stress tests in order to verify if your DDoS solution is working. The best way to do this is by waiting for a real DDoS attack, or you can manual test it yourself.

What is Stress Testing

Stress testing is an information system action that tests system behavior under high volumes of requests. The unit of measure used is RPS (Requests Per Second)

Load testing allows you to explore the performance of your system when dealing with increased load. For example, if you’re experiencing huge spikes in traffic during Black Friday. The purpose of a stress test is to analyze the capabilities of an IT infrastructure if it ever experiences a DDoS attack.

DDoS attack services are often called IP stressers or booters. There is no consensus on how legitimate they are. Hiring a Stress tester that is not considered a violation of the law, as long as it comes with written confirmation from the resource owner. In order to ensure that your stress test is legal,a background in law (or a lawyer) should be your first step.

Why Run a Test Attack

Stress testing allows you to simulate an unrealistic traffic spikes to see if your site can hold up.

Stress testing is a way of finding out the breaking point of your IT environment without making it face real danger. This helps provide insight into how scalable the infrastructure is and answer questions like “What would happen if X happened?”.

• What is the normal load range of the site, what is its limit to sustained service failure?
• The current DDoS protection system should be able to handle huge attacks well.
• Where is the weakest element in the system?

This article describes which processes are most vulnerable to a breach and ways to increase the system’s immunity against attacks. Sometimes this requires drastic measures, such as changing protection providers, but it also provokes new opportunities.

Stess testing allows you to compare DDoS protection solutions and see their effectiveness without putting your site in danger.

How to Run a Stress Test

Stress testing gradually ramps up in 15-25% increments to ensure your website can handle the maximum realistic load. Location of these tests is also crucial – they need to be performed at the geographical location that simulates how an end user would access your site’s content.

Before you start a procedure, it’s good to think about how you will measure the results and evaluate them. They might not experience any issues, so checking before getting started is essential. This system analyzes the following metrics:

• the response speed of web-based resources being tested
• some of the error codes that you might find from a server response
• CPU, memory, and disk specs each peaked at the same time.
• Channel Load

The most detailed report will sum up the OSI model and give details on different layer vulnerabilities: UDP Flood, Fake Session Attack, SYN Flood, HTTP Flood, SlowLoris and others. The more types of attacks involved, the more detailed and comprehensive our report will be

Risks of Stress Testing

A stress test is one of the ways you can simulate a real DDoS attack & see how strong your site’s defences are. Even if the attack only lasts for a few hours, it can cause disruptions to your operations – e.g. problems accessing

Before you go ahead with live stress tests, remember that it’s easier to identify and fix bugs when the user base is less active. You can also let users know beforehand if you’re running maintenance so they don’t come across any unexpected glitches.

DDoS attacks are some of the most common cyberattacks and if you don’t want to put your target audience to any inconvenience, it’s best that you find a way to do them in a virtual environment. Virtual environments are made to imitate the real infrastructure, so they have identical parameters which makes carrying out an attack much easier. It would take more resources and might need expert help, not to mention the results may still be different.

How to Choose a Stress Testing Service

We don’t offer stress testing or cooperate with companies that provide such services. However, from time to time we’re asked how these services can be found and what should be tested – so we have prepared a guide on how to find a stress tester and how to test their protection against cyberattacks.

1. Search. Stress Testing is a service that’s hard to find, but with the right VPN it becomes easier to find the high-quality providers. Make sure you do your research and look at reviews first because there are a lot of low-quality service providers.

2. Security. We recommend creating a secure mailbox like protonmail for this service.

3. Comparison. It can be hard to shortlist the perfect provider, but you should consider offers from multiple experts and think about these features::

• Unfortunately, there have been a few errors on the site.
• how the size and scope of the network (botnet) are described
• a major benefit of outsourcing is the availability of support teams.
• methods for measuring resistance are available
• Availability of prepayments

Don’t trust the services that offer you a stress-test. That does not really show their quality of writing or portfolios, so what would be the point?

4. Payment. Prices for subscription-based stress testing services depend on the following options:

• I’m not sure what you mean by, “test duration,” all I can do is spellcheck this for you.
• Too many tests can affect the quality
• ability to adjust power to a selected limit
• The number of testing methods available is growing every day.

Most websites have the Basic plan. This is enough to simulate what a DDoS attack would look like on your site

Final Thoughts

A stress test can objectively measure how prepared your network is for an abnormal load, but running one by yourself may require a lot of effort.

Stress tests for a project should be realistic and loosely based around the services offered on the market. Lots of aspects need to be taken into consideration, so choose carefully and don’t rely too much on your own knowledge. Involve experienced professionals in your decisions.

Just like any other service provider, we want you to be able to test our services before you buy them. This article includes some of our recommendations about how to do so effectively. We hope it’s helpful!