A small Minnesota company plans to give the Keynotes of the world a run for their money. Dotcom-Monitor recently made available a Web site load-testing service.

According to CEO Vadim Mazo, customers can get started monitoring their Web sites on the public Internet for less than $10 per month. The company uses a system of distributed agents to simulate end user traffic on customer Web sites.

The new Web Load Stress Testing Tool costs about $50 for a one-time test to determine if a Web site is up to added burden. Not only does the service, which typically requires no software installations on end-user sites, show how well the Web site will perform, but it will also pinpoint areas of weakness. Customers that want to test the performance of their intranet and applications running internally would need to open their firewalls and install Dotcom-Monitor agents on their nets.

"If the Web server can handle the load, but the firewall has a problem with it, our service will show customers that, and they can take measures to fix the problem," Mazo says.

To load-test a Web application customers would specify how many simultaneous users they would like to have, how many times each user must go through the application, the delay between users, among other parameters.

Dotcom-Monitor provides customers with the configured Web page, and after they set up the conditions for the load test, they can also create a precise time when testing will start. Mazo says the company recommends running a free trial load test to verify that the test is designed properly.

During the test the simultaneous users will be divided equally among all of Dotcom-Monitor's agents throughout the world, and these virtual users will start load-testing the customer's Web application. "Following the test, customers can see exactly where they need work and how many users the Web application can handle via that site," Mazo says.

Dotcom-Monitor offers an online calculator to determine the final cost for the stress load test before a customer begins testing: http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/stress-calculator.asp

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.