WPLoadTester 7 Cloud spreads load generators across EC2 instances with source-IP diversity, coordinates one test across multiple AWS regions, aggregates every engine’s metrics into one dashboard, provisions and tears down the fleet automatically, and reaches private endpoints via VPC peering or in-VPC co-location.
A cloud test provisions one or more EC2 instances per region. Each instance runs the WPLoadTester load engine and carries its own share of the test’s virtual users. Because each EC2 instance gets its own public IP, the load arrives at your application from many distinct source addresses rather than a single high-traffic source.
Source-IP diversity matters more than it gets credit for. A real production user base hits your application from thousands of unique addresses. Per-IP rate limiters do not trigger; geo-routing logic distributes traffic naturally; load balancer hash functions actually distribute. A load test from one IP looks like a single very aggressive user, which is the wrong shape entirely. WPLoadTester’s default distribution makes the load look like real traffic instead of an attack.
One test profile, engines in any combination of AWS regions. us-east-1 for North American customers, eu-west-1 for European, ap-southeast-1 for Asia-Pacific, any combination you set up. The controller coordinates ramp, hold, and tear-down across all of them.
Cross-region traffic surfaces what same-region traffic hides: real DNS resolution time, real TLS handshake overhead, real cross-region network latency, real CDN edge behavior at each geography. The engines themselves still run in your AWS account at AWS rates; they are just located where your users actually are. Read about Bring Your Own Cloud
Every load engine streams its measurements to the same WPLoadTester analytics surface, live during the test and persisted after. The default view is the test as a whole: response times, error rates, throughput, per-page durations, capacity numbers, all aggregated across every engine and every region.
Per-region and per-engine breakdowns are available for diagnosis, but you do not have to compose them yourself out of separate per-agent log files. One test produces one dashboard. Read about the Metrics Dashboard
The fleet provisions when the test starts. EC2 instances spin up to the count and instance type your profile specifies, the WPLoadTester load engine boots on each, the controller waits for the fleet to report ready, and the test begins. When the test ends, every engine terminates.
EC2 charges flow directly to your AWS account at on-demand, reserved, or Spot pricing. You pay only for the minutes the engines actually ran, and the instances do not linger between tests. For a 1-hour 100,000-VU test, the EC2 fleet exists for 1 hour. No idle compute, no separately-billed test-lab infrastructure.
Not every target is internet-facing. Admin consoles, back-office services, internal APIs, and staging environments behind a firewall need load testing too, and the public-internet topology does not apply to them.
For internal-only targets, the engines co-locate inside the target’s VPC (or peer to it across accounts) and traffic stays inside your AWS account boundary. Credentials stay inside your network. The license, the recording, the replay workflow, and the analytics dashboard are identical to public-facing tests; only the network topology changes. Compliance scope does not expand.
Cloud execution is the default, but the engines do not have to run in EC2. When the target lives on an internal network, or you would rather use hardware you already own, download the WPLoadTester load engine and install it on your own machines. The engines run inside your network and the load originates from there.
On-premise engines coordinate with WPLoadTester the same way cloud engines do: one controller, one aggregated dashboard, virtual users spread across every available engine. WPLoadTester measures each machine’s load-generating capacity and gives the stronger machines a larger share, so a mix of an 8-core server and a spare laptop still produces an accurate virtual-user count with no per-machine calibration.
On-premise load generation is part of the Cloud license and above. Download the load engine
Run a cloud load test in your own AWS account.
Distributed engines, multi-region coordination, aggregated metrics, auto-provisioning, and VPC peering all ship in WPLoadTester 7 Cloud. Request the beta to run a real cloud test against your application.
Comparing tiers? See the Free vs Pro split.