What is DNS load balancing all about? Well, the fact is that you can’t allow a web server to overload. If your business website has a slow and faulty network, it will definitely impact the end-user experience. It will cause poor perception of the site and so on to your organization.
Therefore it is important to implement a load balancing method when you are managing your network.
What is DNS load balancing?
DNS load balancing is a technique for administrating the traffic of a hostname. It is about troubleshooting the distribution of inbound network and application traffic across multiple servers.
Websites with a lot of traffic are operating with many requests from users or clients. For every request, they have to return the exact and correct text, images, video, or application data, all in a fast and safe way.
DNS load balancers are intelligent. First, they use various criteria and examine the traffic. Next, they decide to let the traffic proceed or stop it and redirect it to a different server based on the current packet load or another parameter.
Complete comparison between DNS load balancing and Hardware load balancing
Types of Load Balancers
A load balancer can be arranged to administrate the traffic based on:
- Location of the query – In that example, your DNS understands from where the traffic is coming. It redirects to a particular IP address that will accommodate faster and overall better performance. An example of this type is GeoDNS.
- If a server is busy – Managing the traffic based on the occupation of the servers it’s also possible. In that case, the queries could go to the next closest DNS server if the main server is overloaded. The network will remain effective and will continue to function.
- Based on the arrival of the query – This is a very basic and also easy balancing method. The queries go to another server based on the time of their arrival. The first request goes to server one, the second to server two, and so on. After that, it starts over.
- Weighted balancing – It could be based on any value, which determines which server should and can get more traffic. For example, it can be the server’s computing power.
These are the basic ideas behind load balancing, but there are more examples and combinations.
Load Balancing Benefits
- Reduced downtime – Followed by increased performance and maintaining the uptime
- Redundancy – This means that when the website traffic is sent to two or more web servers, and one server goes down, then the load balancer will automatically assign the traffic to the other working servers
- Flexibility – IT administrators can perform several maintenance tasks on the server without impacting the site’s uptime. Оne server is always available to pick up the workload while others are undergoing maintenance. This guarantees that the site’s users do not experience any interruptions at any time.
- Efficiency – Load balancing helps detect failures early on and maintains them efficiently, ensuring that failure of any kind doesn’t harm the servers or the workload.