Can your website balance the load in times of high traffic?
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Some websites face problems, such as decrease in website loading speed, downtime, or generate high-traffic spikes. The only solution to those problems is adding a load balancer or moving your project into the cloud.
TL;DR If your web presence grows and you need to handle higher volumes of traffic or multiple server requests per second (with many users on your site at the same time) the server resources get exhausted and the site gets slower which decreases user experience and conversions and you lose money.
To solve this problem you will need to connect multiple servers to do the tasks or buy a cloud hosting solution, which might be the pest option for you in terms of mobility and price since the cloud services are getting more advanced and cheaper every day. Almost all of the best hosting that we recommend already have managed cloud solutions for you so make sure you check them.
If you are curious how the cloud process works, keep reading and if you want to test your site and how it performs with high traffic and when it is time to upgrade it, you can use a free service like loader.io
Lets get into the details.
It is a known fact that when your business grows, it starts to generate more traffic, and you won’t be able to handle it if you have only one server. There is no doubt that you will need faster hard disk drives, high processing power, more RAM memory, and high up-link port capacity. Even if your server is very advanced, at some point it will reach its maximum capacity, which will lead to the need of dual servers. They will help you to handle the database, while another server hosts the applications, and the website.
You are definitely going to need the load balancer when the dual-server configuration won’t be able to balance the growing traffic. It will enable multiple servers to act as a cohesive unit. It will also provide redundancy, in order to secure information, it will split tasks among multiple servers, and it will shift processes in case of server malfunction.
The key role of the load balancer is to distribute all the traffic to 1 IP address. Of course, everything depends on the type of server, system, and networking configuration. Another advantage of the load balancer is that by using it, you get boosting speed and reliability, without any loss of data, or service interruptions. It uses custom hardware, software, and methods, in order to distribute traffic to different nodes. The two most common uses of the load balancer are: limiting point of potential failure and ensuring redundancy.
In this graphic you can see the logic of the load balancer.
If you are wondering what redundancy does, here’s your answer. It helps the IT managers to configure load balancers and ensure that there is no loss of data.
The non-responsive nodes may be passed by reassigning the data by load balancer and the uptime may increase when there are less or no points of failure.
There are three types of load balancers: predictive node, round robin or static, and least connect.
- The load balancer with predictive nodes analyzes servers and allots traffic to the node, which predicts will soon have the best performance.
- With the round robin or static, distributes the traffic between all of the servers, but it doesn’t consider the existing performance and load.
- The least connects sends new connections to the server, which has the least connections in the pool.
