It is no secret that news websites are some of the most vulnerable to unpredictable traffic peaks and targeted DDOS attacks, especially when it comes to highly important matters like breaking news, election nights, and emergencies. Keeping the audience informed during these events is incredibly important, and even a short downtime can cause irreparable damage to the website’s reputation — and there is nothing more important for a news outlet than its reputation.
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Reliability and Speed
News outlets have to be accessible and reliable at all times if they intend to ever beat their competition in such a crowded niche. However, even well-prepared infrastructures can break, and the only way to ensure 99.99% uptime is to regularly test them using high-end tools. There is also another problem — several different testing methods exist, and each service provider relies on a different approach. Which one should a local news website choose?
Overload.su is a stress test service founded in 2024 by Jordan McRae, and it has achieved over 20,000 clients in less than a year, thanks to its unique, realistic stress testing approach. The team completes over 50,000 tests daily and uses the latest technologies to ensure that its clients are protected at all times.
As Jordan McRae explains, news websites provide thousands of pages to their readers, and their infrastructure is generally quite weak and unstable, especially considering how many risk factors there are to deal with.
“Breaking news can multiply traffic within minutes. Audience behavior is highly volatile: refresh rates can skyrocket, and there can be multiple concurrent live streams or data feeds. When it comes to local events, geographic concentration of traffic can overload specific servers or CDNs, and a large portion of traffic comes from mobile, which adds backend strain to the mix. Now think of ad-serving, comment systems, and personalization features that add further complexity — and you will realize that there is no way around stress testing if you want your website to function at all,” says Jordan McRae.
How Overload.su simulates real-world traffic surges
When it comes to working with news websites, Overload.su relies on geo-targeted load simulation that mimics regional news events with high accuracy. The team uses algorithms that test both frontend and backend performance under pressure, including bot-like refresh behavior and live video stream simulations, making the simulation as realistic as possible.
“Local news publications are the most vulnerable websites, since they generally don’t have a strong infrastructure in the first place. Yet, when situations of high importance happen. Local publications are by far the most important sources of relevant information for people who live in the area. Losing that source to a technical issue is horrible, especially when it comes to natural disasters or other dangerous events,” says Jordan McRae.
Overload.su provides scalable traffic generation to fulfill any test requirements, reliably identifying load balancer limits, caching strategy issues, and database bottlenecks that the client can then fix. The team enables news websites to optimize their CDN configuration and failover strategies in a timely manner, and ensures that APIs and third-party integrations don’t become single points of failure.
“Proactive testing is always cheaper and less damaging than post-outage recovery. Think of lost ad revenue — even a few minutes of downtime during peak traffic can cost thousands. Downtime can also hurt search rankings and news visibility in Google. Overall, you have to protect yourself beforehand, because fixing problems on the go will cost you more and can cause significant long-term damage,” says Jordan McRae.
Planning Tests and Maintenance
As he explains, the team always works with newsrooms’ IT and DevOps teams to schedule tests around editorial calendars to avoid any potential disruption — ensuring full accessibility is a priority. Overload.su’s approach also includes re-testing after infrastructure changes or before major events, so that website owners can analyze the team’s comprehensive reports and ensure readiness for traffic surges or potential attacks.
If you find yourself interested in Overload.su’s services, then make sure to connect with the team using the Contact Us section on the official website.
