You might be asking, what is load balancing software? Load balancing software is, to put it simply, software that evenly and efficiently distributes incoming network traffic across a group of backend servers.
Websites that contain high traffic serve hundreds of thousands or even millions of users. These high volumes of traffic mean that you’ll be needing more servers.
So, what’s the point of a load balancer? A load balancer effectively oversees and monitors your servers to ensure that no server is overworked, which may reduce performance. This article will look at the benefits of load balancing software and how it can help your business or company.
Benefits Of Load Balancing Software
Scalability – Now, it’s great if you have a ton of traffic on your website, props to you! The problem is, a sudden rise in traffic can cause your site to halt and crash.
That’s where load balancing software comes in. It enables you to keep your website stable by spreading traffic across multiple servers. You can also scale the servers up or down depending on how traffic fluctuates.
Achieve Redundancy – An interesting tidbit of information to note is that when you have two or more servers and one fails, the traffic can be passed onto the other servers. Cool, isn’t it?
More Flexibility – This benefits mostly IT folks. To those of you working in IT, you can perform multiple maintenance tasks without affecting your site’s uptime.
Maintenance Time Isn’t an Issue – If you’re a large, global business or company, load balancing software will enable you to shut off servers for maintenance without throwing off balance in other locations.
It’s Easy to Start – Hardware load balancers can be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to install, but software load balancers are easier to use, more cost-effective, and enables you to use them immediately.
Security – Load balancing software has the ability to reject suspicious-looking packets of information.
The Importance of Load Balancing
Load balancing is super effective in the cloud, where enormous workloads can overwhelm a single server. Without the help of load balancers, incoming traffic would be in complete disarray.
Some load balancers are even able to detect which server is likely going to go down and be unavailable and redirects traffic into other servers. This depends on the load balancing algorithms.
Load Balancing Algorithms
Load balancers use the following algorithms to decide where to send network traffic:
Round-robin algorithm: This is the simplest way of load balancing. It merely moves requests through a list of available servers in the same order.
Least-Connection Algorithm: The least-connections method is a little more intricate. It sends requests to the servers that are processing the fewest workloads at any given moment.
Least-Time Algorithm: The least-time algorithm picks servers based on both the fastest processing speed and the fewest active requests.
Hash-Based Algorithm: In this algorithm, the load balancer assigns a unique hash key to the source and destination IP address of the client and server.
As you can see, load balancing software can be immensely helpful for your business. It can save a ton of your money, provide more satisfaction to your visitors and clients, and increase your reliability.
All things considered, you definitely may want to seriously think about getting load balancing software for your business, as there are a whole lot of benefits it offers.
