Web-server – is it worth to use load balancer on web server/website

load balancingweb-server

I have a website and a while ago, the web server of the company hosting my website was down for about a day. I consulted the company for a solution on how i can stop this from happening in future and they suggested to have a second machine and which will be connected to my current website/web server by a "load balancer" (at an additional huge cost!!!). The second machine will be replicate of the first one and so if i goes down, the other will always be running.

—- Explanation —–
My hosting company suggested that it will be a good idea to have a second machine running at the same time and both the machines will be connected by a load balancer which reduces the rist of a downtime. The second machine will be a mirror of the first and any changes to first must be replicated in the second.

I don't mind spending money if it really saves my website from going down. I want to know is it worth having this "load balancer" for my purpose?

My website is a 24/7 service. I cannot afford an outage of 24 hours/1 hour. I don't mind using this "load balancer" as far as it is really worth. I am not sure if its just a marketing trick of my hosting company or really a "best" solution.

Thanks for help.

Regards

Best Answer

Depends what you require your service level to be. If you need to be up 24/7, then go for a high availability solution.

Your host's current suggestion sounds a little questionable. As you've described it, if the primary server goes down, the load balancing service dies too and there's no way to offload traffic to the backup. When load balancing you usually opt for a DNS based solution that has multiple A records, each pointing to one of your servers. If one goes down, clients will try the next in the list. This means that there is no single point of failure that is within your control.

As to whether it's worth paying a lot extra for, it depends on a lot of things.

Here's my suggestions:

  1. Evaluate your availability requirements. What's your budget? What's your minimum uptime requirement? Do you need all of your service to be high availability, or just some of it?

  2. Research replication technologies for the types of service you are using. Most SQL database servers offer replication as a feature. It may be cheaper and more reliable to set up your own load balancing and replication across two separate hosting platforms, e.g. one on your existing provider and one on a cloud VPS provider such as Amazon EC2.

  3. Look into hosting services that provide a Service-Level Agreement (SLA). A "three nines" SLA means that they are required to be up 99.9% of the time, and must pay you a penalty fee if they fail to meet it. Four nines is 99.99%, five nines is 99.999%, etc. It may end up being cheaper to go for a decent SLA rather than explicitly setting up replication, though both may be a good solution if you need very high availability.

  4. Ask your provider(s) about backup facilities and the average fix response time for different hardware failures (e.g. dead disk, fried PSU, etc). Shop around to find the best figures for the right price.

  5. Consider looking at providers that use data centers that operate on more than one fiber network, e.g. Cogent and Level3. This means that if one connection goes down, you're very likely to be still up via the other connection.

It's all about tailoring a solution that's right for your service. If you find that your budget isn't sufficient to keep availability at the level you need, then it may be time to rethink the feasibility of your project.

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