For the intermediate or experienced webmaster, web server performance takes precedence over the affordability and cheapness of a web hosting plan. Web hosting providers use several techniques and applications to constantly monitor the performance of their web servers and to ensure a quality experience for their customers. One of the ways web hosting providers ensure top-notch performance for each of their customers is by utilizing load balancing technology, which evenly distributes server resources amongst a network of web servers in a systematic and calculated fashion, while also performing various other tasks. The following information explains load-balancing and how it affects web hosting performance.
What Does Load Balancing Technology Do?
With the inconsistent nature of the Internet, it is nearly impossible to predict traffic levels and the amount of specific server requests for each Web server on a daily basis. Load balancing technology allows the web hosting provider to reroute inbound Internet protocol traffic and distribute it evenly across their network of servers, to ensure that no servers are overloaded with traffic or disk space requirements. Load balancing technology has been enhanced and expanded upon, and is the core concept that led to the development of cloud hosting, one of the most popular recently developed web hosting types. With load-balancing applications installed on a network of servers, if one server does not have the necessary resources to accommodate a specific request, the request is forwarded to the next server in the network instantly. Although this slightly slows down the page load times, it also completely eliminates the possibility of server downtime when used with adequately sized server networks.
How Does the Load-Balancing Process Work?
The load-balancing process is relatively elementary in terms of technological complexity. When a web surfer performs an action on a website, they are actually issuing a request to a web server. Usually, without load-balancing technology this request would go straight to a single server, which may or may not be overloaded at the time. With a load-balancing networking application installed on the server, the request is routed through the load balancer and then to an appropriate Web server on the network which has been determined to have adequate server resources to accommodate the request. Thus, load-balancing applications effectively guarantee uptime by allowing the web hosting service to continue even when server failure or server maintenance is taking place. This concept can be expanded and used in worldwide server networks with Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) technology.
Various Load Balancing Methods
Web hosting providers use various load-balancing techniques, with the three main methods being the Perceptive, Fastest Response Time, and Weighted Round Robin methods. The Perceptive method predicts server capabilities based on historical and current data logs, while the Fastest Response Time message chooses a server based on how fast their current response time is. Both of these methods can be used when every server on the network has similar hardware specifications. However if the servers have different hardware specifications, the Weighted Round Robin method would be used, which assigns requests to specific servers in rotation according to predefined weights or likelihood percentages, which are determined based on how capable each server currently is according to manually monitored server reports.
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