No business wants to deal with web server overload. Having a faulty network can adversely impact your operations and critical business services and may result in a poor end-user experience. When that happens, your profitability may plummet, making it harder for you to reach your bottom line.

Even if you claim to have a robust infrastructure, you can’t expect a single server to handle all the traffic. You’ll only increase the chances of overworking your server and be rendered unreliable. If you often deal with high traffic, you would benefit from load balancing solutions.

 What Is Load Balancing?

Load balancing is a technique that organizations use to balance the workload across different servers from a server pool. It’s like a virtual traffic cop that routes client requests across servers to answer them quickly and with efficiency in mind. It ensures that no single server is overworked, or degrades in performance. Should a server go down, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining online servers. Conversely, if a new server is added to the server pool, the load balancer will automatically send requests to it and can also rebalance the load across the server pool.

Your business may opt to go for traditional load balancing, which involves the distribution of traffic across servers in one locality like a data center. You could also go for a global load balancer or global server load balancing (GSLB), which distributes the workload across different data center locations.

Load Balancing Techniques

Now there are many techniques and algorithms that your organization can use to load balance client access requests across servers. Your decision should ultimately depend on the type of service or application being served, as well as the status of the network and servers at the time of the requests.

• Round Robin

This technique involves a simple method of load balancing servers. Multiple identical servers are used to deliver the same services. Each one is configured to use the same internet domain name, but they’re given unique IP addresses. A DNS server stores all the IP addresses and the corresponding domain name. When requests for the IP address associated with the domain name is received, the address is returned in a rotating sequential manner.

• Weighted Round-Robin

This one is similar to the simple round-robin, except that the servers are given a static numerical weighting. Servers with higher ratings get more requests sent to them.

• Least Connection

This method takes into account the current server load. The current request goes to the server that is servicing the least number of active requests at any given time.

• Weighted Least Connection

Like the weighted round-robin method, this one has servers with a numerical value. The load balancer uses the value when allocating requests to servers. If two servers have the same number of active connection, then the server with the higher weighting will receive the new request.

• Agent-Based Adaptive Load Balancing

With this method, each server in the pool has an agent that reports on its current load to the load balancer. The information is then used when determining which server can best accommodate the request. It is often used in conjunction with other techniques like weighted round-robin and weighted least connection.

Load Balancing by Resonate

Should you find that your business would benefit from load balancing, Resonate Networks offers only the best load balancer products and load balancing solutions to serve your needs. Get in touch with us today.