What is load balancing?

Load balancing is the process by which inbound traffic to your website or web application is distributed across multiple servers.

In the majority of cases a physical load balancer is situated in front of your servers, or server cluster. It distributes traffic across the load balanced servers in accordance with a set of predefined configuration rules.  The load balancer constantly checks the health, or availability, of the servers within the hosting platform.

Load balancing is an automated process.  It seamlessly improves the user’s experience by sharing traffic across the designated servers so speeding up the website performance. 

Load balancing is particularly important for busy networks, where it is difficult to predict the number of requests that will be issued to a server.