Hosting Strategies for High-Traffic Sites: Load Balancing

Hosting and Load Balancing for High-Traffic Sites

Managing high-traffic WordPress sites is a struggle, especially during peak periods like product launches, flash sales, or viral content surges. Without the right hosting strategies in place, websites risk slow loading times, poor user experiences, or even crashes! One of the tools you need in your arsenal to ensure your site remains fast and reliable under heavy traffic is load balancing.

In this article, we explain how load balancing works, why it matters, and how Pressidium’s technology provides the reliability and performance busy websites need. Whether you run an online store, a content-heavy website, or an e-learning application, this solution adapts to meet your traffic and performance requirements.

Before we explore the strategies for effectively implementing load balancing, let’s start by understanding what it is and how it works.

What is Load Balancing?

Load balancing is the process of distributing incoming traffic across multiple servers (server pool).

This prevents any single server from being overwhelmed, even during traffic surges or spikes, ensuring smooth website performance, optimized response times, and consistent uptime for websites and applications.

Why is this Method Important?

Load balancing is a must for ensuring high availability, optimized speed, and reliability for your WordPress website. Without it, your website may face significant challenges that directly impact user satisfaction and business success. Here is why:

Without load balancing, a single server is responsible for handling all traffic. During peak traffic periods, this can quickly lead to server overload.

Overloaded servers cause slow response times, crashes, and downtime, which frustrate visitors and lead to lost revenue. In a single-server environment, if the server fails, the entire website becomes unavailable, creating a single point of failure that jeopardizes reliability. With load balancing, all these risks are mitigated.

How Does Load Balancing Work?

Load balancing introduces horizontal scalability, a solution where additional servers are added to the solution to handle increasing workloads.

Instead of upgrading a single server (vertical scaling), horizontal scaling allows traffic to be distributed across a pool of servers, providing flexibility and efficiency.

Load balancers act as traffic directors, dynamically distributing requests among multiple servers. The process involves:

1. Client Request: A user (client) initiates a request by accessing a website or an application. The request is then directed to the load balancer rather than directly to the server hosting the website or application.
2. Traffic Distribution: The load balancer distributes incoming requests using special algorithms, such as “Least Connections“, which routes traffic to the server with the fewest active connections. Another popular algorithm is “Round-Robin“, which evenly distributes requests across all available servers in sequential order.
3. Health Checks: The system continuously monitors the health of backend servers using techniques including HTTP requests, ping, and TCP checks. If a server is unresponsive or fails these checks, it is automatically removed from the pool, ensuring that only healthy servers handle traffic.
4. Sticky Sessions (Optional): For applications requiring session persistence, sticky sessions ensure that requests from the same client are always routed to the same server. This is particularly useful for e-commerce websites or applications where user data (e.g., cart contents) must remain consistent throughout the session.
5. Response Delivery: The server sends the response back to the load balancer, which forwards it to the client. If sticky sessions are enabled, future requests from the same client will be routed to the same server.

Types of Load Balancing

Load balancing comes in various forms to address diverse needs, from basic traffic distribution to advanced intelligent routing. Understanding these types helps you select the best solution for your infrastructure, whether your priority is performance, reliability, or global scalability.

Application Load Balancers: Smart Routing for Complex Applications

An Application Load Balancer (ALB) is vital for websites or applications with multiple components, such as APIs, user interfaces, and databases. Operating at the application layer, it routes traffic based on specific requests, like delivering API data or loading an image. ALBs understand requests’ content, making them ideal for dynamic, content-rich platforms like e-commerce sites or media-heavy websites.

Network Load Balancers: High-Speed Distribution

When speed and raw performance are critical, Network Load Balancers (NLB) step in. Operating at the transport layer, NLBs handle large volumes of connections quickly and efficiently, making them perfect for real-time applications like video conferencing or gaming. They’re built for simplicity and speed, ensuring low latency even under heavy traffic.

Hardware vs. Software Load Balancers: Finding the Right Fit

Some organizations opt for hardware load balancers which are dedicated appliances designed for high performance and reliability. Others prefer software-based solutions, which are more flexible and cost-effective, especially for cloud environments. The choice depends on your infrastructure and scalability needs, but both types can integrate seamlessly into your system.

Now that we’ve explored different types of load balancing, let’s look at how these methods are applied in real-world scenarios.

Real-world Applications of Load Balancing

Load balancing plays a critical role in supporting high-demand environments. Here are some real-world examples:

E-Commerce Websites: Handling the Rush

During flash sales or holiday traffic, it’s not just products that are in high demand – servers are, too! Without load balancing, spikes can slow down sites or cause crashes, costing businesses sales and reputation. By distributing requests across multiple servers, load balancing ensures fast, seamless checkouts, even during the busiest periods.

Streaming Platforms: Delivering Buffer-Free Content

Streaming platforms deliver uninterrupted content to millions worldwide. Load balancing reduces latency and avoids buffering by directing viewers to the nearest or least busy server, ensuring smooth streaming even during blockbuster releases or live events.

Online Gaming: Keeping Gameplay Smooth

Multiplayer online games demand stable server performance to avoid any lag and disconnects, especially during competitive matches. Load balancing spreads player connections across multiple servers, providing a stable and responsive experience.

Cloud-Based Applications: Scaling with Demand

Cloud applications, from collaboration tools to SaaS platforms, often face unpredictable traffic. Load balancing dynamically allocates resources as demand rises or falls, therefore ensuring consistent performance for businesses of all sizes.

From e-commerce to gaming and the cloud, load balancing doesn’t just keep websites and applications running – it ensures that they thrive, even under the most demanding conditions.

Pressidium’s Load Balancing

At Pressidium, we build upon standard load-balancing principles while incorporating advanced features tailored to WordPress hosting.

Here’s how our approach compares to and improves upon typical load-balancing methods:

Caching with Varnish: Unlike most load balancers that solely distribute traffic, our system combines high-performance caching and load balancing with a highly customized version of Varnish.

1. The load balancer checks the first in-memory “hot” caching layer for stored content. If the requested content is available, it is delivered instantly, bypassing backend servers and significantly reducing latency response times.
2. If the content isn’t cached in memory, then a much larger “warm” cache is checked. This cache is stored in local high-performance NVMe solid-state storage. If the requested content is available there, it is immediately served to the client, while also now being stored in memory (hot cache) for future requests.
3. If the content isn’t cached at all, the request is sent to a backend server to generate fresh content, which is then cached for future use.

Dynamic Traffic Distribution: By default, we use custom-engineered “Least Load” algorithms, an enhanced version of “Least Connections” that considers not only active connections but also CPU and memory usage. This ensures requests are distributed efficiently across servers.

Depending on specific requirements or use cases, we may use other algorithms to optimize traffic routing and maintain peak performance.

Proactive Health Monitoring: Our solution goes beyond basic health checks by continuously monitoring the performance of backend nodes. It ensures traffic is routed only to healthy servers and automatically removes any unhealthy nodes, maintaining consistent uptime and reliability.

High-Availability Infrastructure: Most websites hosted on Pressidium are powered by high-availability server clusters instead of a single server. This setup leverages two individual servers (or load balancers) with separate IP addresses to enable redundancy and load balancing, ensure failover protection, and eliminate single points of failure. While using a single server is functional, it sacrifices the critical benefits of load balancing and high availability that our infrastructure provides.

Combining industry-standard load balancing techniques with our proprietary enhancements, Pressidium provides unmatched performance and reliability for WordPress websites, even during traffic spikes.

Our customers experience these benefits firsthand every day, sharing how our platform effectively manages high-traffic periods with seamless performance. From faster page loads to zero downtime during flash sales, their positive feedback highlights the real impact of our technology.

We’ve also documented real-world examples showcasing how Pressidium’s architecture, including load balancing, has helped businesses thrive under demanding conditions. Explore their success stories to see how Pressidium elevated their WordPress performance – or simply click below to start your own journey to better performance!