In a web hosting environment, the role of a load balancer is to distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers or resources. Its purpose is to optimize resource utilization, improve scalability, and ensure high availability for web applications.
When a user sends a request to a website, the load balancer acts as the entry point and examines factors such as server health, current workload, and other metrics to determine the best server to handle the request.
Load balancers can use various algorithms to determine how to distribute traffic. These include round-robin, where requests are distributed in sequential order; weighted round-robin, where servers are assigned different weights based on their capacity; least connections, where the algorithm directs traffic to the server with the fewest connections; and IP Hash, which uses the client's IP address to consistently redirect requests to the same server.
Overall, load balancers play a important role in managing and optimizing web traffic distribution, enhancing performance, and ensuring the smooth operation of web applications in a hosting environment.
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