RS Web Hosting

Rackspace's Intro to Web Hosting course no longer seems to be fully online, as I could not get any content to load besides a brief description of each course. I was most interested in writing about load balancing out of the available topics, so I will give a brief synopsis based on my own research.

Load balancing is the distribution of a workload across many nodes, and is typically used in web hosting for balancing traffic across multiple servers acting together as the web front-end. A load balancer allows users to control the distribution of traffic going to a single IP across as many servers as they desire according to the level of activity coming through. It can keep a website stable through traffic spikes, and can help maintain the stability of a website as traffic increases over time. There are several methods of load balancing: round robin, in which the load balancer will send traffic to each node in succession; least connect, routing traffic to the server with the lowest number of active connections; and historical intelligence (aka, the 'perceptive algorithm'), in which the load balancer chooses a server based on the current number of open connections and response time of the nodes.

Below is a screenshot of the non-functioning Rackspace website.