In our Datacenter we have two Diesel Generators, Three Load Balanced Fiber Rings, Dual Power Feeds, Redundant Network and Hardware Nodes.  When you are looking for a High Availability Hosting Solutions, the greatest point of failure is your Single Web Server.  Hardware Loadbalancing offers a way to remove the single point of failure in your application.

To get hardware loadbalancing you must have at least 2 or more VPS or Application Servers.  The Load Balancer will then divide the load between multiple servers, and reduces the actual load on the server.  The hardware device will even take the SSL encryption off the server and carry the SSL encryption load for you.

The different modes available for Load Balancing are: Round Robin, Fastest Response Time, Least Connections, Weighted Round Robin, or a Custom/adaptive Type. A simple explanation would be to say if you run an e-commerce web site; You are like a grocery store, and you want to get a user through the checkout lane the fastest. Right now you only have one checkout lane, and customers are lining up. If you “Load Balance” and open a second checkout lane the user load or wait time is cut in half. If the register runs out of receipt tape (i.e. Server crash), users can switch to the other checkout lane. The end goal, you want ensure the fastest and most reliable service to your customers, so they do not shop elsewhere. I am sure we have all seen a customer leave a store because the line was too long, or the site was not available.

Another benefit of Loadbalancing two servers is being able to take a server off-line to do an upgrade or patch on the system with Zero Downtime to the entire application.  This is a common practice used in patching enterprise applications.

Hardware Loadbalancing of a VPS or Dedicated server is one way to ensure 100% uptime of your enterprise application.  You can also now view your server load balancing configuration and availability in the Client Area, under your Load Balancing Service.