Load Balancing
Increase performance and reliability of your web application with the Brightbox load balancing service.
Our Load Balancing service enables you to spread out the work of serving your application across two or more Brightboxes.
How does it work?
- We provide you with a new Load Balanced IP address (which resides on our load balancers), which you configure your domain to resolve to.
- Our load balancers distribute requests across your pool of healthy Brightbox servers.
- Health checks are performed every few seconds on each of your Brightboxes. Should one of your Brightboxes becomes unavailable, it is taken out of the load balancing pool until it is available again.
Pricing
Pricing for the load balancing service is based on the number of Brightbox servers you have in your load balancing pool.
| No. of servers in pool | Price per month |
|---|---|
| up to 3 | £19 |
| 4 to 9 | £29 |
| 10+ | £59 |
Why use the Brightbox Load Balancing service?
- High Performance
Multiple Brightboxes handle traffic in parallel – dramatically increasing performance of your application - High Availability
Should one of your Brightboxes become unavailable the others will handle traffic until it recovers - Scalable
Additional Brightboxes can be added to your load balancing pool quickly and simply - Simplified maintenance
Perform routine maintenance on your Brightboxes without downtime
Load Balancing Q & A
What changes will I need to make to my application to implement load balancing?
The main thing to consider, if your app handles file/image uploads, is how files uploaded via one Brightbox will be available to other Brightboxes in your pool. Using a service such as Amazon S3 or the Brightbox Shared Filesystem to store your uploads (e.g using attachment_fu or paperclip) deals with this issue.
Can I load balance multiple applications?
Yes, just configure your additional domain names to resolve to your load balanced IP address and configure your app servers as normal.
My app uses SSL, is this a problem?
No, SSL is not affected by the load balancing service, your Brightbox application servers will handle SSL in the normal way.
What if I need to change the load balancing configuration I initially specified?
Soon you’ll be able to manage load balancing configuration from your control panel, but in the meantime simply submit a support ticket specifying “Load balancing change request” as the category and we’ll implement the configuration changes for you.
What hardware/software are you using for the load balancing service?
Our Load Balancers consist of a dedicated pair of Dell Dual Core 2.2GHz servers with 4GB RAM running a customised LVS installation.
Why don’t you use F5 or Coyote Point hardware like some of your competitors?
We like open source software and the freedom this gives us to customise things to fit our requirements e.g to integrate with our planned “cloud” services in future. We’re also a bit sceptical about “enterprise” solutions – after all, that’s why we’re Ruby people not Java people :)
What type of scheduling algorithm is used on your load balancers?
Our default configuration uses a “Least Connection” scheduler which means connections are allocated to the server with the least number of connections. There are other scheduling algorithms available should you wish to use them, get in touch for more information.
Getting started
To get started, simply Login to your account and choose Load Balancing from the “Buy extras” page.
If you have any questions or need further information, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.