Load balancing with dedicated managed servers

What is load balancing?

In order to fully understand load balancing it helps to also have to have an understanding of server clustering, as load balancing is a type of server clustering.

When an existing single server can no longer handle the high volumes of incoming traffic, website pages will load more slowly. Additional servers can be added to a solution to counteract this, thereby enabling the distribution of traffic/load among a couple or a group of servers. This distribution of traffic/load is what we term load balancing.

Load balancing is especially important for networks where it's difficult to predict the number of requests that will be issued to a server. Busy websites typically employ two or more web servers in a load-balancing scheme.

Load balancing applies to all types of servers, including application and database servers and it can be implemented with hardware, software or a combination of both.

Load balancing provides the perfect solution to the problem of hardware failure in environments where downtime cannot be tolerated. Distributing processing and communications activity evenly across a computer network means that no single device is overwhelmed.

Can the load balancing be switched on and off?

Once a load balancer detects a problem with any of a client’s servers, it will automatically take it out of the cluster and allow maintenance to be carried out. Once this work has been completed, the server can be put back into the cluster and allow load balancing to carry on as usual.

The load balanced solution is specifically designed to cope with one of a cluster of servers being taken out of the cluster without affecting the service that is provided to the users – leaving no single point of failure.

To talk to an Account Manager today about dedicated managed servers, call 0800 4584545, or request more information online.