Load Balancers and High Availability
A load balancer sits in front of your servers and spreads incoming traffic across them. It is a cornerstone of high availability — keeping a service running even when individual servers fail or get busy.
This article explains the role it plays in a reliable setup.
Two Jobs at Once
- Sharing load: no single server gets overwhelmed while others sit idle.
- Handling failure: if a server stops responding, traffic is sent only to the healthy ones.
What High Availability Means
High availability is about removing single points of failure. With a load balancer and several servers across availability zones, one failure becomes a non-event rather than an outage your customers notice.
Health Checks
Load balancers continually check whether each server is responding correctly. An unhealthy server is automatically taken out of rotation and added back once it recovers, all without anyone intervening.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a load balancer for a small site?
Not always, but even two small servers behind one give you resilience that a single server cannot.
If you need a hand with any of this, your Progressive Robot delivery team is ready to help. Raise a ticket from the Support area of your client portal or speak to your account manager and we will guide you through the next steps.