November 14, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web hosting provider SoftLayer (softlayer.com) announced on Wednesday it has added an automated, hardware-driven load balancing solution to its portfolio of automated managed services. The new service is available starting at $49 per server.

"Historically, provisioning and managing load balancing has required a high degree of expertise and considerable person hours, making it cost-prohibitive for many site owners," says Ric Moseley, SoftLayer VP of engineering. "We've lowered the cost barrier to this dynamic tool by creating a fully automated solution that integrates into our leading, easy-to-use customer portal and API."

SoftLayer's enterprise-class load balancing solution uses industry-standard techniques such as round-robin, lowest latency, least connections, shortest response and IP persistence, to balance traffic among two or more servers. It can be instantly activated and ready to configure, and servers can be added to or removed from the balancing pool on-demand with no downtime.

Coupled with the company's standard two to four-hour dedicated server delivery, SoftLayer customers' Web presence can scale infinitely and on-demand. The new load balancing solution joins the many services that the company has automated including hardware firewalls, enterprise backup, storage solutions and network management.

SoftLayer announced yesterday it has signed a five-year $16 million contract with Internap to deliver data center and network services to power its utility hosting solution.

Copyright © 2007 Web Host Industry Review, Inc. All rights reserved.