Setup, configuration, and hardening
- Self-Hosted (HAProxy / Nginx)
- You
- Atlantic.Net Managed Load Balancing
- Atlantic.Net engineers
High Availability · Health Checks · Managed Firewall
Managed Load Balancing
Distribute traffic across healthy web and application servers with managed health checks, automatic failover, SSL termination, sticky sessions, and four supported balancing algorithms, delivered alongside Atlantic.Net's Managed Firewall.
- Round Robin & Least Connections
- Health Checks & Automatic Failover
- SSL/TLS Termination
- Integrated Managed Firewall
Supported Algorithms
4
Pool Health Monitoring
24/7
Load Balancing
Today's modern high-traffic websites are expected to serve millions of concurrent sessions and still deliver fast, reliable web pages and digital content. A load balancer is a cost-effective, performance-enhancing solution - and Atlantic.Net delivers it as a managed service alongside our Managed Firewall.
Load balancing distributes traffic across a pool of web and application servers, and it can dramatically improve customer experience under sustained or bursty load. Our service lets you add diverse application and web servers into a load-balancing pool to deliver a faster, more reliable experience to your customers and end users.
What Is Load Balancing?
Load balancing is a technique that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers to ensure optimal resource utilization, improved performance, and high availability for applications - especially during peak usage periods. The load balancer sits in front of your application fleet, decides which server should answer each request, and routes around servers that are unhealthy or saturated.
What Can Load Balancing Do For Me?
Take the complexity and the technology headache off your team's plate by using Atlantic.Net's Managed Load Balancing service to enhance the performance and reliability of your business-critical websites:
- Load Balancing - distribute incoming application traffic across multiple Atlantic.Net servers for an improved customer experience.
- Ensure High Availability - increase reliability, redundancy, and failover capability by sending requests only to healthy servers, providing continuity during unexpected outages.
- Flexibility - add or remove servers as demand changes - perfect for clients with seasonal peaks or busy promotional periods.
- Increase Scalability - Atlantic.Net's Managed Load Balancing grows with your business. Whether you start small or scale aggressively, the service adapts.
- Reduced Downtime - during scheduled maintenance, live services stay online while individual servers are updated.
- Increase Performance - provide better response times to web services by distributing the workload.
Load Balancing Algorithms
Atlantic.Net's Managed Firewall and Load Balancing service supports the load balancing algorithms most teams need:
- Round Robin - this simple algorithm sends incoming traffic to the next available server in the load-balancing cluster, in sequence (node 1, node 2, node 3, and so on).
- Static Round Robin - this method allocates a weighting or priority to a particular server, so incoming traffic is distributed to the preferred node(s) in the cluster when available.
- Least Connections - the load balancer tracks the number of open connections per server and sends each new request to the least busy server.
- IP Source - connections are distributed based on the source IP address. This is a great option for geolocation-aware load balancing. As long as the same set of servers is healthy, a given client IP always lands on the same server.
Load Balancing Features
Atlantic.Net's Managed Firewall and Load Balancing service combines the most popular techniques in load-balancing technology, backed by the Atlantic.Net Firewall Service so you get security plus traffic distribution under one managed offering. For more information, email [email protected].
- Sticky Sessions - this efficiency feature keeps a user connected to the same web server for the duration of their session, avoiding the cost of re-opening session state on multiple servers and reducing overhead.
- Health Checks - the load balancer probes pool members for availability and health. Unhealthy nodes are flagged and bypassed until they recover.
- SSL Termination - SSL/TLS encryption is decoded on the load balancer before traffic reaches the web server. This improves performance and reduces the cryptographic workload on backend nodes.
- Multi-Port Balancing - this advanced technique routes traffic configured for a specific application port to one or more servers, giving application developers more performance flexibility.
- Connection Throttling - protects the load-balancing pool when specific incoming requests demand significant resources, preventing bandwidth-heavy applications from impacting the entire cluster.
Self-Hosted Load Balancer vs. Atlantic.Net Managed Load Balancing
| Capability | Self-Hosted (HAProxy / Nginx) | Atlantic.Net Managed Load Balancing |
|---|---|---|
| Setup, configuration, and hardening | You | Atlantic.Net engineers |
| Algorithms (Round Robin, Static RR, Least Connections, IP Source) | Yes - manual configuration | Yes - pre-configured and tunable |
| Sticky sessions | Yes | Yes |
| Health checks and automatic failover of unhealthy nodes | Yes - you tune intervals and thresholds | Yes - managed defaults |
| SSL/TLS termination | Yes - you manage certificate lifecycle | Yes - certificate handling included |
| Multi-port balancing and connection throttling | Yes | Yes |
| Integrated with managed firewall and DDoS mitigation | No - separate stack | Yes - same managed service |
| High availability of the load balancer itself | You build the HA pair | Yes - HA included |
| 24/7 monitoring of pool health | You | Atlantic.Net NOC, US-based |
| Compliance posture (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS) | You | Atlantic.Net audited environment |
| Time to deploy | Days to weeks | Hours |
Algorithms (Round Robin, Static RR, Least Connections, IP Source)
- Self-Hosted (HAProxy / Nginx)
- Yes - manual configuration
- Atlantic.Net Managed Load Balancing
- Yes - pre-configured and tunable
Sticky sessions
- Self-Hosted (HAProxy / Nginx)
- Yes
- Atlantic.Net Managed Load Balancing
- Yes
Health checks and automatic failover of unhealthy nodes
- Self-Hosted (HAProxy / Nginx)
- Yes - you tune intervals and thresholds
- Atlantic.Net Managed Load Balancing
- Yes - managed defaults
SSL/TLS termination
- Self-Hosted (HAProxy / Nginx)
- Yes - you manage certificate lifecycle
- Atlantic.Net Managed Load Balancing
- Yes - certificate handling included
Multi-port balancing and connection throttling
- Self-Hosted (HAProxy / Nginx)
- Yes
- Atlantic.Net Managed Load Balancing
- Yes
Integrated with managed firewall and DDoS mitigation
- Self-Hosted (HAProxy / Nginx)
- No - separate stack
- Atlantic.Net Managed Load Balancing
- Yes - same managed service
High availability of the load balancer itself
- Self-Hosted (HAProxy / Nginx)
- You build the HA pair
- Atlantic.Net Managed Load Balancing
- Yes - HA included
24/7 monitoring of pool health
- Self-Hosted (HAProxy / Nginx)
- You
- Atlantic.Net Managed Load Balancing
- Atlantic.Net NOC, US-based
Compliance posture (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS)
- Self-Hosted (HAProxy / Nginx)
- You
- Atlantic.Net Managed Load Balancing
- Atlantic.Net audited environment
Time to deploy
- Self-Hosted (HAProxy / Nginx)
- Days to weeks
- Atlantic.Net Managed Load Balancing
- Hours
Ensure optimal application performance and reliability. Atlantic.Net's Managed Load Balancing delivers high availability and predictable scalability. Contact us to add resilience to your infrastructure. For faster application deployment, free IT architecture design, and assessment, call 866-618-DATA (3282) or email us at [email protected].
[email protected]Frequently Asked Questions About Load Balancing
What is load balancing?
Load balancing is a technique that distributes incoming network traffic across a pool of servers so no single server is overloaded. The load balancer sits in front of the application fleet, decides which server should answer each request, and routes around servers that are unhealthy or saturated. The result is better performance, higher availability, and more predictable scaling under load.
Why do I need load balancing?
Any application that needs to stay online during a server failure, scale beyond a single server's capacity, or absorb traffic spikes is a candidate for load balancing. Common drivers are seasonal peaks, marketing-driven traffic surges, regulatory uptime requirements, and the need to perform zero-downtime maintenance on individual servers.
Which load-balancing algorithms does Atlantic.Net support?
Round Robin, Static (Weighted) Round Robin, Least Connections, and IP Source. Round Robin and Static Round Robin distribute by sequence and weight; Least Connections sends each new request to the least-busy server; IP Source pins traffic from a given client IP to a specific server, useful for geolocation-aware routing or session affinity at the network layer.
What's the difference between Round Robin and Least Connections?
Round Robin distributes traffic by simple sequence regardless of how busy each server is, which is fine for short, similar requests but can overload a server stuck on a slow request. Least Connections looks at the actual open-connection count and routes to the least-loaded server, which handles long-lived or uneven workloads more gracefully.
Does the service include SSL termination?
Yes. SSL/TLS termination on the load balancer decrypts incoming HTTPS traffic before it reaches your backend servers. This centralizes certificate management and reduces the cryptographic workload on each web server, improving throughput. End-to-end encryption between the load balancer and backends is supported when policy requires it.
What are sticky sessions and when should I use them?
Sticky sessions (also called session affinity) keep a given user pinned to the same backend server for the duration of their session. They are useful for applications that store session state in local memory and cannot share that state across servers. Stateless applications - those that store session data in a shared cache or database - do not need sticky sessions and benefit from more even load distribution without them.
How are server failures detected and handled?
The load balancer continuously runs health checks against every server in the pool. When a server fails its check - for example, no response on the configured port within the configured timeout - it is taken out of rotation automatically and skipped until subsequent checks confirm it has recovered. Atlantic.Net's NOC is also alerted so engineers can investigate the underlying issue.
Can I add or remove servers from the pool dynamically?
Yes. Servers can be added to or drained from the pool on request, which is what makes the service well suited to seasonal peaks, marketing launches, or rolling maintenance. Atlantic.Net engineers handle the change so existing sessions are not disrupted.
Does this integrate with Atlantic.Net's Managed Firewall?
Yes. Managed Load Balancing is delivered alongside Atlantic.Net's Managed Firewall on the same FortiGate-based platform, so you get traffic distribution and perimeter security under a single managed contract, with one policy framework and one support relationship. GeoIP load balancing is also available via the Network Edge Protection service.
How is the Managed Load Balancing service priced?
Pricing is based on the size of the load-balanced pool, the throughput required, and the bundled features (SSL termination, GeoIP, integration with Managed Firewall). Contact our sales team for a quote tailored to your environment.
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