Load balancing is a way to distribute traffic across more than one server - demanding less from each machine, which improves their efficiency.
As traffic goes to your servers, the load balancer decides which servers can handle that amount of traffic at what times - maintaining the best possible user experience and keeping your application highly available.
Load balancing also gives you a high level of flexible scalability. As your user base grows, seamlessly add application servers to the pool without downtime. And if one server fails, others make sure your application stays online. Other benefits include TLS workload offloading to a load balancer, and IP floating without the need for a Layer 2 domain.
Load balancers also conduct continuous health checks on servers to ensure they're handling traffic loads. Load balancers typically consist of a hardware appliance but are increasingly becoming software-based. Load balancers are an essential part of an organization's digital strategy. At Servers.com, we offer HTTP/HTTPS (Layer 7) and TCP (Layer 4) load balancing services.