What is Load Balancing Server?

February 6, 2008 / Dedicated Server Hosting

Load balancing server is used to distribute traffic efficiently among the network servers so that no particular server overloaded. Load balancing server improves the overall performance by distributing traffic efficiently among the network properly . Load balancing server is a guide to this critical component of high availability, clustering, and fault tolerance. All of which provide the infrastructure for reliable Internet websites and large corporate networks. Much of the information on load balancing comes from vendor-specific manuals that use inconsistent terminology and often biased toward the products they cover. Server Load Balancing explains to engineers and technicians the concepts and terminology of load balancing and offers practical guidance for planning and implementing it in almost any environment.

Why we need a Load Balancing Servers ?

If there is only one web server responding to all the incoming HTTP requests for your website. The capacity of the web server may not be able to handle high volumes of incoming traffic. Once the website becomes popular or once the traffic increases. The particular website’s pages will load slowly and because of this some of the users will have to wait until the web server is free to process their requests. The increase in traffic and connections to your website can lead to a point. Where upgrading the server hardware will no longer cost effective.

So in order to achieve web server scalability, more than one server needed to add for distributing the load among the group of servers. Which also known as a server cluster. The load distribution among these servers known as load balancing. Load balancing applies to all types of servers (Application server, Database server etc.