Stress test or cloud stress test?
Both put a site you have verified under more pressure than a quiet day and watch how it copes. One is a light, early check; the other holds real pressure.
Side by side.
| What is compared | Stress testing | Cloud stress testing |
|---|---|---|
| Plan | Pro and Business | Business |
| Runs from | Cloudflare's network | Isolated cloud infrastructure |
| Peak load | A fixed peak of 6 concurrent connections | A peak you choose: 50 to 1,000 virtual users |
| Length of a run | 30, 60 or 90 seconds | From 1 minute to 1 hour; a soak up to 4 hours |
| Shapes of load | One | Four profiles: gradual, aggressive, spike and soak |
| Tests a month | 50 on Pro, 300 on Business | 20 on Business |
| The question it answers | Does anything give way early? | How does it behave at the peak you choose, and what fades under sustained load? |
| In the report | Degradation factor, peak p95, error onset and recovery | Peak p95, degradation factor, peak throughput, error rate and recovery |
Which one?
Choose stress testing when
- You want an early, low-cost sign of instability.
- You want a margin-of-safety check before a busy period.
- You are on Pro.
Choose cloud stress testing when
- A multi-day sale or a long campaign is coming.
- You suspect a slow leak that only shows under sustained load.
- The lighter test held every request and you want to push much harder.
A healthy site often holds every request in the lighter test. That is a result, not a failure of the test. Both run only against a site you have verified.
More comparisons.
Load test or cloud load test?Security scan or deep TLS analysis?Uptime monitoring or the Down Checker?Security Headers Checker or security scanning?SSL Certificate Checker or deep TLS analysis?One account, or separate tools?BCDRPulse or a dedicated uptime monitor?BCDRPulse or a dedicated load-testing service?BCDRPulse or a dedicated vulnerability scanner?Continuous resilience or a chaos engineering platform?
Start with your own sites.
Monitoring is free for 10 sites. Add the tests when you need them.