If you own or run an online business, you must know about load balancing. Yes! Let’s say that it will help you to distribute your success and not get overwhelmed!
Load balancing – What is it?
Load balancing means a process to distribute traffic among different servers. Its purpose is to prevent excessive strain on a single point or server and to make the work more efficient. Thanks to load balancing, websites, networks, services, and applications can enhance their performance and reliability.
How does load balancing work?
Load balancing works through a tool known as a load balancer. It can be based on software or hardware. A load balancer hardware-based works with a dedicated device to execute its task. While a software-based load balancer can work on a server, the cloud, or a virtual machine. It will be positioned in between the users’ devices and the webservers.
This way, every time a DNS request from a user is gotten, the load balancer will decide to which server to send it, so it will properly route it to the chosen location for being fulfilled. The load balancer decides this based on availability and the servers’ busyness. The load balancer works through different algorithms to get this information from every server.
If it detects a traffic overload or any issue with a specific server, it won’t send the request there. Instead, it will look for another server that can respond. While doing its job, distributing the traffic, the load balancer optimizes the overall performance of your network or website.
Why do you need load balancing?
You need load balancing because it means attractive benefits for your online business.
It enhances the users’ experience. Stressing a server can make its performance very slow. Requests can drop, so the users won’t get a response, and it can even crash. Practicing load balancing, latency will be reduced considerably.
It’s an effective security tool. Load balancing prevents bottlenecks and manages traffic spikes, which is key in case of a potential DoS or DDoS attack.
It prevents infrastructure failures. Stressing a specific server with higher workloads than the ones it can manage can cause failures. Fixing them will mean extra costs for you.
It makes scalability easier. Your objective is to increase traffic. In a moment, a server won’t be enough to satisfy the demand of visitors your website gets. Then you will add a second, third, fourth, and more servers. But having the infrastructure without a means to control and distribute the traffic, you still could face bottlenecks or strain in a single resource. A load balancer is the 24/7, ideal manager of traffic you need to use those servers smartly and get the best out of them!
What do you need to know about DNS-based load balancing?
DNS-based load balancing is used to spread traffic across multiple web servers. This ensures that each server receives an equal amount of requests and can handle them efficiently. There are two main types of DNS-based load balancing that provide different benefits: Round Robin and Geographic DNS.
- Round Robin DNS involves having the DNS server distribute requests in sequence, assigning each request to a different server on rotation until all have been served. This provides an even distribution of requests across all available servers while minimizing latency as users only reach the closest server due to its short TTL (time to live).
- Geographic DNS or GeoDNS is the second one. It determines the user’s IP address, country, city, or another geographical region, then routes requests toward those closer physical locations. This makes response times faster for end users far from their original sources. This is perfect for websites with large international audiences, like e-commerce stores selling globally online.
Conclusion
Traffic is key to success. The more visits you get, the bigger your profits. But to reach high traffic is only one step. The next one you should consider is how to handle it. Get a load balancer to be in charge and enjoy the growth!