What is load balancing

[Dazza30]

Could some one tell me what load balancing is in plain english please ?

The reason im asking is, im trying to speed up my websites load time and will soon reach the end of my technical ability doing it.

I have been told by my hosting provider that load balancing can help speed up a website by hosting it on multiple servers etc.

Is this correct?

[Frostie]

Load balancing is where the load (your visitors) is balanced between 2 or more servers.

For example, in lamens terms, your domain name, instead of pointing to a website, will point to a load balancing server. The job of this is to determine how many visitors it has sent to server1 (uk based) and how many it has sent to server2 (us based). It will then do a load of computations based on how you configured it such as time per user spends on your site etc, and from this determines which server to send your visitor.

Basically it means having a duplicate website, on a different server (possibly in different datacentres or countries) to ensure the performance of your website (or application) is fast for your visitors. It also helps with failover (should one server go offline), but you will NOT see duplicat data in google, as your website despite on 2 servers, is still only accessed via 1 URL.

I would expect most affiliates not to have Load Balancing in place, however big corps that have 100s of websites or those that get vast volumes of traffic, will have shed loads of load balanced servers. E.g. BBC News. Although you and I, and every other man and his dog go to news.bbc.co.uk - we will all be browsing the same site however the actual hardware and IP address of that particular server will be different. You wont see the different IP Addresses, as the domain name will point to the load balancing server - its this that fires us all off to different boxes.

Hope that helps

[tbp]

It can do, basically it means that several servers can serve your site. This means that if one server is experiencing a high volume of traffic, or doing something particularly intensive, another server thats less busy will take over so theres no slowdown.

The request from a browser goes to a load balancer, and that in turn then forwards the request to the server thats best suited to deal with it at that particular time. All this is invisable to the end user, they can see the load balancer but nothing beyond.

It can mean that your site is server quicker, especially if it's currently on a shared server, where other hosted sites can affect the performance of your site, but hogging CPU resources and memory.

It also has the added advantage of built in redundancy. If you're on a shared or dedicated server and the server goes down through a hardware failure, then normally your site would be taken offline. However, with load balancing, if one server fails then another one can instantly take over and continue serving the site.

It is usually more expensive, and mainly used for resource heavy sites that need all the resources they can get.

It's easy to update, as you don't have to FTP your files etc up to every server, it's sent to one and then automatically synchronised onto the other servers in the group.

I would see if maybe you could get a trial for a month, and see how much benefit it gives you.

[mainlime]

Unless you're doing some huge amount of traffic I doubt very much that load balancing should be your first choice for speeding up the site.

What are your hosting arrangements at the moment?

[Dazza30]

Originally Posted by mainlime Unless you're doing some huge amount of traffic I doubt very much that load balancing should be your first choice for speeding up the site. What are your hosting arrangements at the moment?

Ive decided to go with a cheap hosting option untill i see positive financial returns.

I am with fast hosts and im using their basic windows shared hosting option Fasthosts

They are currently offering load balancing at an extra £45 per year.

[tbp]

I am with fast hosts and im using their basic windows shared hosting option

Thats the problem

It's just paying extra for your site to be online slightly more than it is normaly. Their hosting is terrible, it frequently goes down because of the number of sites packed on each server (which is how they can offer low prices). The load balancing is just paying extra for getting the same uptime as you would anyway with a decent host.

Changing host and putting the money you would of spent into load balancing towards the slightly higher hosting costs would be much better for you.

[mitchbryson]

moving your shared hosting to load balanced dedicated servers is a bit extreme, sounds more like your host is the problem for speed, just shop around. I've been with over 10 hosting companies before I found one i liked long-term.

and if you need more bandwidth, just move onto VPS, then VDS then a full dedicated server before you think about load balancing.

[Darren M]

Moving to a load balanced web farm can be tricky, it's not always just a case of copying your code to all of the servers. There should be no problems with brochureware sites, but in some extreme case, sites that rely on session information need to be redesigned. It all depends on how the load balancing is setup though, hardware solutions (eg. Cisco) are generally better than software solution like Windows Load Balancing.

You need to ask your host where the bottleneck is for your site before you commit to going down this route. More than likely their servers are maxxed out hosting other people's sites. In which case you would be better off finding a new host.

[Dazza30]

Thanks to everyone who posted a response in this thread.

Turns out deffering some javascript that i call externaly speeds up the page load time.

Are fast hosts not a reliable host then?

Also off topic has anyone here ever used cache manipulation to speed up their site and if so how much use is it?

[tbp]

Are fast hosts not a reliable host then?

God no lol, although they are one of the biggest in the UK, they are also one of the worst and notorious for it. Sites frequently go down, and are often very slow.

It's all down to their low prices, the only way of achieving them and still paying a profit is by putting as many sites on a server as possible. That overloads it however and so it frequently goes down, and when it does work slows things down.

Its not as bad if you have a dedicated server, but their core pipes have gone down before cutting all their customers off the net.

As I mentioned in another thread, hosting is one are where you get what you pay for. There are a couple of good low priced hosts, but this is rare. After snapping up loads of hosting companies for years, Pipex has now been sold as they say there is no longer any profit in hosting, as everyone is offering cheap deals which give very little margin.

Even with the cheap ones, the hosting may be cheap, but then if you go over your bandwidth allowance they stiff you on that, at prices of up to £30 a Gb. Compare that to my server in the states which is 25p a Gb.

I would never host any site that earns money on fasthosts, its just too unreliable. Personal sites are fine as if they go down it's not a massive problem, but business sites it ends up costing you money.

[Dazza30]

Originally Posted by tbp I would never host any site that earns money on fasthosts, its just too unreliable. Personal sites are fine as if they go down it's not a massive problem, but business sites it ends up costing you money.

Do you have any suggestions ?

The only other host ive used was 1&1 their customer service is useless so i wont go back there.