We have many customers who as their sites, applications, or services become more popular outgrow the capacity and performance that a single server can provide. I could write a book on the evolution of a website or application, and how the architecture needs to evolve as its traffic doubles, triples, and quadruples exponentially, but for the purposes of this article I’ll use my unmatched Microsoft Paint skills to outline the load balancing concept in a simple manner.
Imagine you have a user who is at their personal computer and wants to purchase something from your online store, or connect to your next great internet idea application. That user connects to your server following the path to eventually reach your server hosted here at 1-800-HOSTING. What happens when you have more users connecting than your server can support, and the end user experience begins to suffer as response and page load times start to increase? The 1st thing most people try is to throw more hardware at the problem through bigger and better servers. This works for a time but isn’t a permanent solution. The next thing is to scale outwards (horizontally) with additional servers (nodes) providing the same function. This is where load balancing comes in by way of a separate device designed to distribute the traffic to the available servers. There are many ways to distribute the traffic based on individual requirements, but it’s safe to say it balances the traffic evenly between your available resources. When combined with fail over functionality, you also can achieve redundancy should one of the servers experience a problem and need to be taken out of the available “pool” of servers.
Sales plug: 1-800-HOSTING provides both dedicated and shared load balancing services for all of our clients and are skilled at explaining how load balancing can work for you, as well as implementing it for your existing services.
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Tags: 1-800-HOSTING, Load Balancing, Scaling
