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NetBenefit’s load balancing services

As you would expect, the complexity and cost of load balancers will reflect the size of your website or application and the anticipated volume of traffic.  A load balancing solution can load balance traffic between two servers or across a large solution consisting of multiple web servers and application servers.

Our load balancing solutions are based upon Brocade hardware load balancers.  Our technical team work with Brocade because of their commitment to the highest levels of quality in the product design, manufacture, and testing.

Contact us to find out more.

NetBenefit offers three different load balancing services:

  • Shared load balancing for basic load balanced servers requiring performance and high availability.
  • Dedicated load balancing designed for websites with high levels of throughput or requirements for SSL load balancing.
  • Global server load balancing with NetBenefit’s SiteRedirect service which provides failover at a DNS (Domain Name Server) level for brands demanding guaranteed high availability across multiple geographic sites.

Dedicated and shared load balancing services

Both dedicated and shared load balancing services can be configured to meet your requirements. Some of the most common options are listed below:

 
Configurable load balancing method
  • Round-robin
  • Weighted round-robin
  • Least connections
  • Least sessions
Stickiness options
  • None
  • IP address
  • Cookie
  • Session ID
Availability check options
  • PING
  • HTTP request to web server
  • HTTP request to customer specified URL
  • HTTP request to customer specified URL with specific response string
Benefits

Shared load balancing can scale on demand which reduces your initial investment costs.

Round-robin is the most commonly used method of traffic distribution but our technical team can also configure your load balancer for weighted round-robin, least connections or least sessions.

We can also define stickiness based upon IP address, cookie or session ID. This allows you to force unique users to always use a specific server.  For example, IP-based sticky sessions send all requests from the same IP address to the same server, which is required for some applications.

In terms of whether a shared or dedicated load balanced solution is best, this will depend on your specific requirements and the web site or application. Shared load balancing is a high-performance solution which allows you to minimise your initial investment costs while keeping the flexibility to scale on demand. Dedicated load balancers tend to support higher levels of throughput, concurrent users and connections per second, and also offer greater support for SSL load balancing.

Once we have worked with you to decide upon the best load balanced solution for your business, our technical team will implement all of the agreed load balancer configurations as part of your managed load balanced server solution and assist in testing.

For a more detailed discussion about our load balancing services, please contact our managed hosting consultants.