Websites Stress/Load Testing Question:

When testing websites, it is critically important to test from outside the firewall. In addition, web-based load testing services, based outside the firewall, can identify bottlenecks that are only found by testing in this manner.
Web-based stress testing of web sites are therefore more accurate when it comes to measuring a site's capacity constraints.
Web traffic is rarely uniformly distributed, and most Web sites exhibit very noticeable peaks in their volume patterns. Typically, there are a few points in time (one or two days out of the week, or a couple of hours each day) when the traffic to the Web site is highest.