Load balancing is especially important for networks where it is difficult to predict the number of requests that will be issued to a server. Busy websites typically employ two or more web servers in a load balancing scheme. If one server starts to get swamped, requests are forwarded to another server with more capacity, providing redundancy and practically infinite scalability. Load balancing offers lower cost, higher performance, and greater reliability than having one large enterprise-scale server. Administrators have an ever increasing need to implement effective solutions for these.

What to expect from the Pugmarks Load Balancing service:
In the past, DNS round robin was considered the standard in sharing the load among servers. Recently, software load balancing packages like Resonate and PC/router based units like F5 and Radware became standard. Today, there is a shift towards switch-based appliances such as Alteon (Nortel), Arrowpoint/Cisco and Foundry. One reason for this is speed. Switch-based appliances offer the highly sophisticated algorithms touted by the software and PC vendors. They display the performance metrics that come naturally to switched architectures. This is the same reason Pugmarks uses routers instead of using a Linux box for routing functions—simpler, faster, easier to manage.

Pugmarks load balancing services are hardware based.

We offer local and global load balancing.
Load balancing services are offered using industry-standard Extreme, Alteon, Nortel, and F5 hardware.

This way you can have the highest availability of your application with zero fault tolerance.

Pugmarks can load balance the traffic based on:

Least connections
Round robin
Weighted round robin
Fastest response
Connection limits

All that is required from you is the specification of the parameters you wish to deploy for load balancing, which can be given to Pugmarks when you sign up. You may request a change in configuration by notifying Pugmarks NOC anytime. Pugmarks NOC carries out the configuration changes within 1 business day of receiving the request.

Pugmarks monitors the functioning of the load balancing equipment firewall on a 24/7 basis. In order to have N+1 redundancy, load-balancing equipment has been installed in a fail-over mode.