Load Balancers General Overview
The quality of service a web hosting server provides to end users typically depends on two parameters — network-transfer speed and server-response time. Network-transfer speed is primarily a matter of your Internet-link bandwidth while server-response time depends upon resources. A fast CPU (especially for CGI programs), lots of RAM (especially for parallel-running HTTP daemon processes), and good I/O performance (especially for disk and network traffic) can make all the difference.
What is Load Balancing?
Load balancing distributes processing and communications activity evenly across a computer network so that no single device is overwhelmed. This is especially important for networks where it's difficult to predict the number of requests that will be issued to a server. Busy Web sites typically employ two or more Web servers in a load balancing scheme. If one server becomes overloaded, requests are forwarded to another server with more capacity. Load balancing can also refer to the communications channels themselves.
When to Consider Load Balancing
When resources are exhausted and your web server is struggling against heavy traffic the Lock Media team will examine your server to determine the overall health of the system, check the application, server resources and potential bottlenecks (hardware or software). If a hardware or software bottleneck is found and cannot be resolved with an application change or increase in hardware, a load-balanced solution would be appropriate. Lock Media can quickly deploy the necessary hardware environment for a reliable load balanced solution.
What makes load balancing different at Lock Media?
The Lock Media load balancing service is fully managed 24x7x365 by our Professional Services Team. They provide device monitoring, hardware replacement and rapid device deployment.
