You might have noticed an unexpected downtime or slowness of your website and wondered why. This often occurs during the holiday or shopping season when lots of customers check out on your site. A sudden increase in resource usage causes the downtime as those seasons require your website to consume vast resources.
Which brings us to load balancing, a process that enhances workload distributions across multiple computing resources to deliver high speed and performance for customers. In the business world, load balancing plays a decisive role in maintaining high productivity. But if your site is to perform seamlessly during those seasons, load balancing for web servers is vital.
Real-world Lesson to Learn
On 2017’s Black Friday, US largest chain of department stores expanded their business online. What Macy’s didn’t prepare for, however, was the high traffic for that holiday season. The site crashed and they lost their holiday sales for the short term.
Moving on, load balancing employs cloud servers to help you handle all concurrent customers on your website in a seamless experience. It not only enables you to provide adequate customer experience, but it also helps in other aspects of growing your site.
Today, let’s discuss 5 key benefits of employing load balancing in pursuit of faster and smoother user experience.
5 Benefits of Using Load Balancing for Web Servers
1. To get rid of downtime
In cloud-based servers, maintenance can be done after channeling the traffic to another server’s resources, provided they are not in maintenance. Eliminating downtime for your website is as simple as that.
2. To handle high performance
With load balancing, you can always add or remove resources when needed without having downtime. The process of adding or removing instances without causing any interruptions to incoming traffic is easy by load balancing cloud servers. The result is of customers reaching your service quickly and getting better overall experience always.
3. To manage server failures
Thanks to its ability to add or remove instances as needed, you have multiple data centers across cloud platform. If somehow one of the servers fails, you can quickly move the traffic—bypassing the failed server to another server.
4. To enhance the security
Load balancing isn’t just about managing traffic flow or eliminating downtime. In the next generation of technological advances like cloud servers and software-defined networking, we can instantly neutralize DDOS attacks and similar security threats by displacing the server in the cloud-based network for another server. This works with no interruptions whatsoever. To add, load balancing helps detect any malicious activity happening on the system.
5. To revamp customer experience
Revamping customer experience is probably the most apparent reason to employ load balancing. If your server gets swamped by visitors due to season sales and marketing strategy, it won’t crash with load balancing. This automatic process will handle all the traffic regardless of how many new visitors you get. To conclude, it checks against poor user experience and ensures that customers have a satisfying experience every single time.
Do you really need load balancing for your web server?
It depends. If your website witnesses sporadic increases in traffic, you should use a load balancer. It also comes in handy if you host content that can generate lots of load in an instance, especially when various users are using the content concurrently. Let’s say you have a video-heavy site; load balancing the video requests with other page requests will load your pages faster. Visitors tend to be happier this way.
In other words, a load balancer helps create a highly available website. High availability refers to how long your site or web app stays up over a given period. If you have ever experienced a site outage, then a load balancer might help you have more uptime.
How does our load balancer work?
Pretty straightforward. First, you should have two or more servers to distribute the traffic using a load balancer. If the sites you’re planning to run are in your VPS instances, we suggest you keep the same web content in all servers. Do remember to keep a single server for your database to keep your data synced.
Once your order is placed, we will create a load balancer (HTTP Requests) for you and attach your instances to this load balancer depending on your request. Then you’ll receive a CNAME record to update in your domain’s DNS zone. Also, keep in mind that you can attach (or detach) any instance to the load balancer anytime.
Once the load balancer is properly set up for your VPS, it scales automatically to handle the spikes to your site. So, you don’t have to adjust them manually.
Using our load balancer makes your site or app highly accessible by spreading traffic across the instances and pointing it to only running instances. We use the round-robin algorithm to assign the new instances in our load balancer.
Conclusion
The benefits of a load balancer cannot be overstated. When you have occasional spikes in traffic, it works. When multiple visitors are using your hosted content at once, it also works. E.g., if you have an image-heavy website, you can load balance the image requests with other page requests. That way, your pages load much faster, and your users are happier.
At AccuWebHosting, we provide a load balancing service to help with times like this. For more details, give us a visit here.
