What is a Network Load Balancer

Free load balancer acts as the robust outer gates of a grand fortress, directing relentless traffic toward the inner bastions that are your servers and applications. It’s a mighty gate that helps protect your applications and website from attacks, while providing scalability, performance, and availability to meet your web or application demands.

It distributes incoming network traffic among multiple servers or resources using algorithms such as Relianoid. The load balancer also monitors the health of backends and proactively selects a healthy server when the current one becomes unresponsive. It supports the most popular protocols used in modern web and cloud services, as well as those for real-time applications like voice and video.

A free network load balancer can be used to help reduce costs and increase uptime for your web applications and website. It can be deployed in your data center and route internet and private network traffic to multiple servers, ensuring that you always have a healthy and available server to handle the load. These benefits can be especially important if you run an online store or any other web-based service that requires high availability and low latency.

Load balancer software is a powerful tool for deploying and managing web, network, and database servers, as well as protecting your data from DDoS attacks. It’s an application delivery platform (ADP) that delivers fast, secure and scalable web and cloud-based applications. It provides security, availability, scalability, and performance by intelligently routing traffic to the best-performing servers and preventing single points of failure that can cause downtime.

There are a number of options for network load balancer software, some of which are open-source and others that offer a variety of features. While all have many of the same functionality, they differ in their throughput capacity and focus. Free load balancer software such as Relianoid is designed for home/lab use, and the throughput limitations make them not viable options for businesses that require high performance.

The Relianoid Community Edition, on the other hand, offers advanced network and application management capabilities not found in free load balancer software from other vendors. It operates at both the L4 and L7 layer, efficiently managing network traffic and web requests with advanced features. It’s designed for performance and flexibility, with support for a wide range of protocols, advanced security features including a WAF, and clustering to ensure scalability.

The free version of the Relianoid application load balancer is a powerful and flexible solution that provides high availability, scalability, and performance for your websites and apps. In addition to load balancing, it includes built-in application monitoring and can be configured with a range of alerts, including phone calls, email, and Slack notifications. For more advanced security capabilities, the Relianoid application load balancer can be combined with a full Relianoid ADP application firewall for a complete solution to protect your data and applications from DDoS attacks.