The concept is simple. When a company has only a single web server, all web traffic goes to that server. This is known as a single point of failure. To fix this problem, investment in multiple servers can help increase capacity to their network. This is where Cybersite Consulting can help you to distribute the traffic in a balanced way that suits your network.

Alternatively, you may have an increase in web activity that means your existing technology cannot keep up with the influx and people start getting rejected. Instead of upgrading your hardware to specialist machines with 4,8 or 16 processors, you can instead use standard servers and simply cluster them together. This means cost effective scaling of your web services and can add more capabilities

The web-related services that most people use for Internet sites are technologies such as JBoss/J2EE, Tomcat, and Apache in the open source arena. Cybersite provides technical knowledge and experience to help troubleshoot any problems and increase the scalability of your web sites. Load balancing can be done in a number of ways including more traditional round robin DNS, through to more advanced methods including Apache-Tomcat mod_jk communication, JBoss clustering, and Apache proxy methods.

1. Fail-over Systems: Avoid having a single point of failure in your system. This means if one part dies, it all dies. Having a fail-over mechanism in place means that the system will keep on functioning as normal, with little or no alteration from the owner or manager. This is the simplest, but often the most important form of load-balancing.

2. Clustering: This is to distribute the load of the service and make it much more scalable. As the workload increases, it is simply a matter of adding more servers with minimal configuration. This allows for a flexible and fault-tolerant system all round.

If you require help in setting up a cluster service, give us a call on 1800 1 LINUX.