In order to make the best out of the technology available to you, a certain degree of education is necessary. At the end of the day, optimizing work processes leads to a more efficient use of your resources and – in the end – a nicer-looking bottom line. So today, we’re going to look at load balancing, a popular term in the IT-powered world of today, and list its most essential benefits.
The basics of load balancing
One of the key things to understand about a data center is how requests that come from your website are processed. In order to avoid overloading a single unit, you need a data center solution with failover and load balancing, the latter of which has the function of balancing the workload and distributing it across different servers. In essence, it’s about finding a way to make the most out of the assets you have at your disposal.
Learn to differentiate between 2 types of load balancing
The first of them is called local load balancing. This is what people are usually making a reference to when discussing the general term. It works like this: instead of processing the request immediately, it gets sent to the load balancer first, which then allocates the workload accordingly, depending on the number of backend servers available in your data center.
There are a number of ways on how to configure load distribution. For example, one option is to set it so that the workload gets distributed to the fastest servers first, while another way to do it is to prioritize the least-burdened servers.
Then we have the geographic load balancing. This applies when you’re working with multiple isolated datacenters at the same time and you’re trying to send traffic to the most closely positioned server based on where the traffic is coming from.
Comparatively speaking, this is probably the more complicated type of load balancing. The vast majority of the time you’re going to be looking for ways to reduce latency, but there are other aspects at play here, some of which include staying compliant with the international regulations. For example, the law dictates that all data belonging to European customers must stay in Europe, which makes matters a little bit trickier.
Benefits of load balancing
By using load balancing, as a website becomes more popular, it’s easier to scale it and reach an even higher amount of readers, as you won’t have to worry about a sudden spike in traffic bringing the entire website to its knees.
Then, load balancing also means less downtime for your website by using redundancy. This simply means that if one server goes down for whatever reason, the traffic simply gets redirected to another one.
Reduced latency is another obvious benefit. In the modern times, people have an incredibly limited attention span, so it’s crucial not to make them wait too long for the website to load, lest you risk having them drift away to another website.
Conclusion
Armed with the knowledge you’ve gained today, all that’s left for you to do is to zone in on a website hosting solution that won’t leave you hanging when you need it the most. Whenever in doubt about a certain provider, reading as many online reviews as possible is your best bet.
