Glossary
Load Balancer
A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers to improve capacity, reliability, and uptime for a website or application.
A load balancer distributes incoming network traffic across multiple backend servers so no single machine becomes a bottleneck or a single point of failure.
How it distributes traffic
- Round robin — requests rotate evenly across servers.
- Least connections — the server with the fewest active sessions gets the next request.
- Health checks — unhealthy backends are automatically removed from rotation.
Layers
- Layer 4 balances by IP and port (TCP/UDP).
- Layer 7 understands HTTP, enabling routing by URL or host — often combined with a
reverse-proxylikenginx.
Why it matters for hosting
Load balancing is the backbone of high availability and scaling: it underpins cloud-hosting, lets you add capacity horizontally, and helps meet an uptime-sla. By spreading and absorbing traffic, it also forms part of ddos resilience.
See also
Reverse Proxy
A reverse proxy sits in front of web servers, forwarding client requests to them while adding caching, TLS termination, and load balancing.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting runs your site across a pool of virtual servers that scale on demand, billed by usage for elasticity and high availability.
Uptime & SLA
Uptime is the percentage of time a service is available; an SLA is the provider’s contractual guarantee of that level, with credits if missed.
Nginx
Nginx is a high-performance, event-driven web server and reverse proxy prized for handling many concurrent connections with low memory use.