It is vital to ensure that your website is always up and running. Moreover, if it’s an e-commerce website, then this is of utmost importance as your revenue generation relies on user experience. A positive user experience results in happy customers and less abandoned carts. One of the ways to ensure the running status of your website is employing load balancing.
In this article, we’ll take a look at what load balancing is and list down the top benefits of load balancing. Let us begin.
What is Load Balancing?
Load balancing allows you to distribute work uniformly across servers or any other computing resources like network links, clusters, disk drives etc. with the aim of optimising resource use, minimising the response time, improving efficiency and reliability.
In this article, we will be focusing on server load balancing for e-commerce websites. With web server load balancing we can ensure improved website loading speed, reduced response time and improved processing rate.
How does Load Balancing Work?
Essentially the work of a load balancer is to handle requests coming from users all over the internet to the server in a timely manner so that the server doesn’t overflow with numerous requests it receives. The load balancer is placed in between the internet and the servers (where all the servers are interconnected to each other) as can be seen in the diagram below.
The load balancer figures out which server is available and then routes the request to that particular server. Determining which server is available is based on various algorithms like Round Robin, Least Connections, Source IP Hash, etc. Load balancers can either be physical, software or a mix of both. Software-based load balancers usually run on virtual machines.
Having seen the basics of how load balancing works, let us move on to the benefits of website load balancing.
Top 3 Benefits of Website Load Balancing
- Improved scalability
There is usually a significant rise in the traffic of e-commerce sites especially during sale seasons like Black Friday or Festive Sales, or if you have an education portal with users logging in for checking examination results, etc. A common problem that arises with such websites is that the servers are not equipped to handle a sudden surge in traffic.
If you too face the same issue then load balancing is the solution. With web server load balancing your load (data) will be distributed across servers uniformly thereby making your website scalable so that it doesn’t crash when there is a heavy influx of traffic.
- Endless Uptime
There could be times when a particular server of yours might not be working and require maintenance, power outages, and more. This could most likely result in website downtime and impact the user experience of your customers.
Server load balancing automatically transfers the load from the affected server to others so that the end-user doesn’t experience downtime, and is always up and running.
- Minimal Failure
With load balancing, it is easier to monitor your communication channels and figure out which server is not performing optimally. This not only improves the website latency but also, ensures there is a minimal failure and your customers’ have a seamless experience.
As a website owner, if you choose the right hosting then installing your own load balancers for your website won’t be necessary. Our Cloud Hosting provides improved scalability, reduced to no downtime and minimal failure to ensure your website visitors experience seamless user experience which contributes to the success of your business.
Hope this article helped you gain a better understanding of load balancing for websites.
