Manage Traffic, Speed and Redundancy

When your business Web site provides mission-critical data or is your main revenue source, slow response times and potential hardware failures are not an option. Protect your business with a customized load balancing solution from Hostway.

If your entire Web site resides on a single server, it only takes one traffic surge to slow response times or a single hardware failure to bring your business to a halt. Load balancing eliminates both problems by using multiple servers to house your data. No single point of failure can bring your Web site down.

The Load Balancing Advantage
Load balancing spreads the work of your dedicated server among two or more servers, optimizing resources, output and response times. If your server fails in any way, requests are routed to other server(s) according to preset criteria - eliminating downtime.

Increase reliability and performance with multiple Web/application and database servers.

• 2 x Web/Application Servers
• 2 x Database Servers
• 1 x Firewall
• Backups (Optional)
• Internal Switch (Optional)

Load balancing gives you:

• Failsafe performance that can't be achieved by a single server
• Faster system response times for a better customer experience
• Improved availability to critical applications
• Guaranteed server uptime
  

Two Reasons You Need Load Balancing:

1. Cost effective load allocation – Expanding horizontally by balancing the load among servers is more reliable and cost effective than vertical scaling solutions
2. Increased redundancy – Effective method of implementing a redundant system

Flexible and transparent, the load balancers can dispatch requests to the different servers and make parallel services of the cluster to appear as a virtual service on a single IP address. Request dispatching can use IP load balancing technologies or application-level load balancing technologies. To increase scalability, nodes can be transparently added or removed in the cluster. High availability is provided by detecting node or daemon failures and reconfiguring the system appropriately.

Example Load Balancing Solution
With two purpose-built load balancers (layer 4-7 application switches) the solution in this example provides acceleration, security and high availability for mission-critical applications.