Distributing traffic
High levels of traffic to a website can put considerable strain on your servers, which can lead to slower load times or even outages – and it is no secret that downtime can be damaging to the reputation and profit of your online business.
Using dedicated load-balanced servers presents an ideal solution for distributing high amounts of traffic across multiple physical servers. This increases performance, avoids bottlenecks and provides a reliable, fault-tolerant infrastructure.
Hyve’s Solutions
Hyve can provide layer 3 or layer 7 load balancers, enabling traffic to be distributed effectively across servers. Layer 3 load balancers distribute traffic based on source and destination alone (IP addresses), whereas Layer 7 load balancers can make load-balancing decisions based on the content of the message.
Hyve’s load balancing can be deployed on dedicated servers running Linux and Windows OS – providing resilience, high performance and flexibility for your business. Using a load balancer with dedicated severs provides all the benefits of a shared load balancing solution, as well as a complete API, high-performance SSL and resources that are solely committed to your infrastructure.
How does it work?
Modern websites and applications can serve millions of concurrent requests every second. In order to return the correct data to the customer efficiently, load balancers act as a “traffic guard”, routing requests across all capable servers.
Traffic from the internet initially passes through a firewall configuration, to one of two dedicated load balancers. The load balancers will automatically monitor inbound web requests alongside the status of your web application servers, and make intelligent routing decisions to send the requests to the most available server.
By setting up your dedicated infrastructure this way, if a firewall or load balancer fails, you will not suffer any disruption to service.
Why load balancing?
If your business needs 100% uptime, a load-balanced infrastructure is a great way to safeguard it. Load balanced servers are usually deployed by large companies with thousands of customers accessing the servers at one time – for example, social networking websites, e-commerce sites, or news outlets.
Load balancing is also beneficial for websites that require frequent maintenance. If one server is unavailable due to updates, the traffic will be rerouted to another server, allowing any maintenance or code releases to be deployed on individual servers without the need for the network to go offline.
If you would like more information on dedicated server load-balancing, give our friendly sales team a call on 0333 256 5633.
