What is load balancing?
Load balancing is a method of distributing web requests across multiple web servers.
Fast UK Hosting provide very high specification servers as standard, but when the websites on those servers get busy - either at certain times of the day or because of running marketing campaigns for example - then we can send visitors to a second (identical) server to view your website.
Without load balancing your website (and every other website on the server you share) would slow down. Sometimes, if the demand on resources is too high, users will experience errors and problems loading any pages at all.
From a more technical aspect, load balancing has further benefits to the reliability and long-term sustainability of you website:
- Redundancy - Should we experience any sort of failure on a web server, health monitoring automatically removes that node from the array, leaving the remaining healthy nodes to handle the requests. This allows us to achieve very high service 'up-times' compared to traditional single node hosting (as high as 99.99%).
- Fast Scaling - Because we can have many web servers under a single load balancer, we can respond very quickly to changes in demand. If we see that response times for a server are falling below threshold, we can add more nodes within minutes to instantly get all sites on that server up to full speed.