Your website or personal blog gets a few dozen visitors daily but imagine if one of your blog post gets popular and starts getting huge traffic from other sites as well.

Is your web server ready to handle this sudden surge in traffic without going down?

To simulate this situation, you can either email all your friends asking them to hit your website at the same time or better still, run an online test at Load Impact.

Load Impact is an online load testing service that will help you determine if your site can handle a large number of users checking in at the same time.

The basic version of Load Impact is free and lets you simulate a load level of up to 50 visitors. You can however opt for a paid version that has a limit of 5,000 concurrent clients and therefore could help you determine the site’s readiness to handle potential Digg or Slashdot Effect.

The Load Impact simulation clients always behave as web browsers with an empty cache. They will always load all objects on a web page, never caching anything. This means that they are sometimes “heavier” than a real client would be.

Related: How to Completely Test a Website