Lets talk Load Balancing. No, not the food kind where you struggle to get turkey, gravy, biscuits and everything else on your plate.
Lets talk high traffic internet bandwidth. So, your business is growing, your web site is getting more and more popular, and the single server you’re currently running is starting to get overworked. What do you do? Add another server, of course, before your site performance starts to suffer. That new server represents a significant investment, and you want to make sure that you’re getting everything you can out of it.
However, simply adding capacity doesn’t always solve the problem. If your initial server is still running at or near full capacity and your second server is only at 20% or so, many your site visitors may experience delays. If your site gets even bigger, the problem can be magnified: you might have ten servers, two of which are maxed out, while two others are almost idle. Even though you have enough servers to run your site efficiently, you’re not getting the site performance you expect. The solution? A load balancer.
A load balancer is a hardware device which receives requests from your website visitors and routes them to your servers to ensure optimal performance. Load balancers are key elements in many of the complex web hosting solutions we’ve built for our customers.
Load balancers have two main benefits: they improve site performance at peak times, and they facilitate failover if one of your servers goes down. Load balancers improve site performance by monitoring your servers and routing traffic to them based on a variety of factors, including total server capacity, current server utilization, and current server performance. And in the event that one of your servers experiences a hardware failure, your load balancer will recognize the problem immediately and stop routing requests to that server, eliminating any site failures for your visitors.
If you’d like to find out if a load balancer is right for you and your website, please contact us and let us know that you’d like to explore your complex web hosting options.
Updated: January 2019
