Make Sure Your Server Can Handle Any Campaign You Throw At It: 2015 Edition

Do we still need to test our servers in 2015? Hell yes we do.

Whether it’s a CDN that you need to know will work as fast as promised when you’re throwing 100 visitors a second at it, a customised tracker that keeps your data private but you need to know will stand up to the heat of a campaign, or a landing page server hosting a complex lander funnel, a server that can’t stand the strain can screw your affiliate business.

And whilst Real-User Monitoring is great, if you’re operating at scale you need to know if your server’s going to die before you place the Insert Order and start the traffic flowing.

Back in the day, I used to recommend a tool called Blitz.io. It’s still pretty good but it has become a lot more expensive, and in the last two years a lot of other options have arrived.

Including my new favourite tool for server testing: Gatling.

Gatling’s almost as easy to use as Blitz, and at least as powerful as the other top server-testing tool, JMeter. And in this tutorial I’ll show you the basics of how to install and use it.

Who will find this tutorial useful, and what do you need to know?

Almost every affiliate can get some use out of load-testing and response-testing their servers.

In particular, load testing is useful for more experienced affiliates running bigger volume, and anyone running a tracker that they’re hosting on their own servers.