You hit the big leagues. Your traffic is going up every month with more and more visitors and your orders are reaching new heights.
But cracks are starting to show. Your server is showing signs that it can’t handle all the concurrent traffic anymore and you are putting more time in to keeping the server up than you are on managing all the sales you are generating.
When one server doesn’t cut it any more and you need to somehow manage traffic over multiple servers, this is where load balancing might be what you need.
What is a Load Balancer?
To put it simply, a load balancer sits between the internet and your servers. It acts like a funnel, directing traffic or network load efficiently across multiple servers. The load balancer knows which servers are best able to handle the traffic it’s directing, so that any incoming requests are managed to maximize speed and server utilization.
As your needs grow and change, you can add more servers easily and effortlessly, and the load balancer will detect and spread requests across this new server added to the available pool of servers
Advantages of a Load Balancer
When you have multiple servers handling incoming traffic requests, you have built in redundancy and therefore reducing downtime. If one server was to crash, the load balancer knows to stop directing traffic there and splits that traffic across the other servers still up and available. When that crashed server comes back online, the load balancer will then begin redirecting traffic across that server as well.
As you can add more servers at any time, this solution is infinitely scalable. When your business continues to grows, you can add more servers to the mix easily and once ready the load balancer recognizes a new device that’s ready to accept traffic.
Another advantage of a load balancer is that it can manage traffic efficiently, directing requests to the server with the fewest current connections.
