Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Specialty Hosting and Markets : 3 Servers - Best way to load balance

[dlewis23]

I have 3 servers and I'm trying to find out the best and simplest way to load balance the traffic across them for one of my sites?

I do not want to go with round robin. Ive been looking into things like pound but I'm not sure if that is going to be the best way to go.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

[abenson]

Are you using Linux or Windows?

[FrankLaszlo]

I've done setups like this using ha-proxy, works quite well. However, before you do this, you might want to consider offloading the database (assuming the site is database driven) to another server, and setting up a dedicated HTTP only server.

[prickett233]

Pound, HAproxy, or Nginx would work nicely as load balancers for low traffic sites.

However if you are pushing alot of traffic, more than what a single servers NIC can handle then you would need to go with a level 4 load balancer like LVS-DR.

[themedia]

haproxy and nginx would run just fine as load balancers.

[JonBiloh]

nginx really works great, highly recommended.

[iTom]

Nginx is more than suitable for most setups, fairly easy to setup as well

[amelen]

If your site isn't too complex, a simple round-robin DNS might be the best bet.

[NYCServers-Nick]

Here's an example on how to setup a load balance solution with Nginx :-)
http://wiki.nginx.org/LoadBalanceExample

[plumsauce]

If they are all local, then a hardware load balancer is a good bet, or Windows + IIS + NLBS which is actually faster than a hardware device but needs special switch configuration.

[eva2000]

definitely check out haproxy for load balancing http://haproxy.1wt.eu/