When you start expanding your business, it makes sense that your servers will have to handle an increasing load of traffic. Mitigating high traffic levels, especially those caused by traffic spikes from sites like Digg and other social news sites, is important to keeping your business online under all conditions. One of the technologies that makes keeping all of your data online much simpler is called load balancing. Simply put it is a web technology that spreads the contents of your server over multiple, redundant systems, allowing you to run traffic to all of the different servers and keep any one machine from enduring too much traffic. There are numerous ways to implement a load balancing system, but by far the best is to have load balancer software running on one server that forwards users to one of the proper servers, preventing the user ever having to deal with choosing a server. You will notice that your machines are consistently fast after you implement such a system.

The other benefits provided by load balancing include the ability to pull a server down to do maintenance without worrying about downtime, the ability to deal with corrupted data or damaged hardware without downtime, and a great deal of control over your traffic, as you are running all traffic through one machine first, so you can use traffic shaping if you find it necessary. Of course, running one of these systems is only strictly speaking necessary if traffic regularly brings down your server, if you have to regularly do server maintenance, or if you are already using multiple web servers and you would like to bring them together.

There are some down sides to using such a system. Load balancers are newer technology, so make sure you buy one with thorough support, as well as one which is used by sites of a similar size, so you know it can handle your traffic capacity. As well, problems with your load balancer will likely take down your whole site, since all traffic has to go through one central location. But the problems associated with load balancers are a fair trade if one is in a position to need one, as having to process all your traffic with one server quickly becomes impractical as your business grows. Do your research and you will likely find a system that works best for you.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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