Load Balancing

As your online business grows, you need a hosting solution that includes PEER 1's fully managed Load Balancing service so that you can enjoy increased capacity, availability and scalability. We use a pair of Foundry® Server Irons in active/active mode for redundancy, which are configured to allow different groups of servers (server farms) to appear as a single "virtual" server that shares a single "virtual" IP address. Requests come in on this virtual IP, which you can assign to any domain name, just like a real IP. The Load Balancer then takes care of the rest, distributing the traffic among the servers. Unlike clustering, Load Balancing does not include any cooperation or content sharing between the load balanced servers. As a result, high traffic applications with static content such as Web or FTP servers are perfect for this type of solution. The Load Balancers are managed and administrated by PEER 1... one less thing for you to worry about.

Highlights

Increased capacity through a "least-sessions" algorithm that allows more users to reach your application.
High availability and redundancy for HTTP, SSL, and FTP applications as servers are removed from the farm immediately when health checks fail.
Servers can be easily inserted or removed from the farm, allowing you to quickly resize your web presence to match demand without costly server upgrades.

How it Works

A Virtual IP is assigned to the application to be load balanced.
Requests to this VIP address are processed at the Foundry® Server Irons, where it checks for the availability of the 'real' IPs on the servers.
Requests are then distributed amongst the available servers. Servers that do not respond to a health-check do not receive any traffic.