One address in front, as many servers as you need behind it
A load balancer takes every request for your site and shares it between your cloud servers, checking each one as it goes. A server that stops answering is taken out of rotation until it recovers, so a single failure is something your visitors never see.
- Round robin or least connections
- TCP, HTTP and HTTPS, with HTTP/2
- Active and passive health checks
- Automatic failover, built in
Requests are shared between healthy servers. Add another server and it joins the rotation; take one out and nothing else changes.
Three sizes, priced by capacity
The size sets how many services and servers a balancer can handle and how many connections it can hold open. You can move between sizes at any time.
WS-LB1
Two or three servers behind one site, the usual first step away from a single machine.
- 5 services
- 25 servers
- 10 certificates
- 10,000 connections
- 20 TB traffic in Europe
- 1 TB in the US and Singapore
WS-LB2
Most popularSeveral sites or environments behind one balancer, with room to grow the pool.
- 15 services
- 75 servers
- 25 certificates
- 20,000 connections
- 20 TB traffic in Europe
- 2 TB in the US and Singapore
WS-LB3
Large pools and busy applications, with the most open connections and the most certificates.
- 30 services
- 150 servers
- 50 certificates
- 40,000 connections
- 20 TB traffic in Europe
- 3 TB in the US and Singapore
Every balancer comes with a public IPv4 and IPv6 address, and a private IPv4 when it joins one of your private networks. Prices are per month; annual billing takes 10% off and is charged once for the year. Prices exclude taxes where they apply.
Load balancers sit in front of WebSols Cloud Servers
The pool is made of our unmanaged cloud servers: root access, NVMe disks and a choice of three lines in Europe, the United States and Singapore. Start with two of the same size and add more as you grow.
Value
from PKR 15,000The lowest price on WebSols Cloud, on processor generations that have been in service long enough to have nothing left to prove. The disks, the network and the traffic are the same as every other line; what you share is the processor, so speed moves a little with the neighbours. Ideal for test boxes, staging copies, prototypes and small sites.
Performance
from PKR 17,000Newer AMD generations, still shared, with the best balance of price and speed. The usual choice for websites, small databases, staging and development.
Dedicated
from PKR 27,350Dedicated vCPUs, one per physical thread, so nothing else competes for your processor time. For busy databases, game servers, CI, SaaS and anything under constant load.
Servers and balancers appear on one monthly invoice, in rupees. A balancer and its servers must be in the same region, though they may sit in different data centres within it.
See cloud servers and pricesFrom one server to a pool, in three steps
You do not need to change how your application is built. The balancer sits in front of what you already run.
- 1
Point your domain at the balancer
The balancer gets its own public IPv4 and IPv6 address. Your DNS points at it instead of at a single server, and nothing else in your domain changes.
- 2
Add your servers as targets
Servers join by public IP, or by private IP when they share a private network with the balancer, so the servers themselves need not face the internet at all.
- 3
Traffic is shared and watched
Requests go round robin or to the server with fewest connections, and health checks decide who is in the rotation. Failing servers come back automatically once they pass again.
Everything a balancer in front of your servers should do
Set up with you when the balancer is built, and changed whenever your application changes.
Round robin or least connections
Share requests evenly, or send each one to the server holding the fewest connections. Pick whichever suits the application.
TCP, HTTP and HTTPS
Balance any TCP-based traffic, or work at the HTTP level with HTTP/2 where the visitor's browser supports it.
Active and passive health checks
A check every 3 to 60 seconds, with a timeout of 1 to 60 seconds and between one and five failures before a server is pulled out. HTTP checks can test a path, expected status codes and a string in the response.
TLS on the balancer, or straight through
Terminate TLS on the balancer and take the decryption work off your servers, or pass encrypted traffic through untouched with a TCP service.
Your certificates, installed and swapped
Upload the certificate you already hold, including a free one, and we install it. Automatically renewed certificates are available depending on where your domain's DNS is hosted, so ask us.
Sticky sessions
Keep a visitor on the same server with a cookie, for anything between 30 seconds and 24 hours, when your application needs it.
The real visitor IP
HTTP and HTTPS services add X-Forwarded-For, X-Forwarded-Port and X-Forwarded-Proto, so your logs and your application still see who is asking. The PROXY protocol is available for TCP services.
Highly available
The balancer itself is redundant. If the hardware under it fails, another takes over automatically with only a short interruption.
Change size at any time
Move up a size when the pool grows, or back down again. Services, servers and connection limits change with it.
Add a server instead of buying a bigger one
Once traffic is shared, growth is a matter of adding another machine to the pool, which is cheaper than doubling a single server and safer than relying on one. It also makes maintenance boring: take a server out, patch it, put it back, with nobody watching a maintenance page.
- Patch and reboot one server at a time with the site still up
- Deploy to half the pool, then the rest, and roll back if it goes wrong
- Mix sizes in one pool, so an upgrade does not have to be all at once
- Balance servers in different data centres within the same region
- Keep databases on a private network, away from the internet
Size by size
What each size holds, at a glance.
| WS-LB1 | WS-LB2 | WS-LB3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Services | 5 | 15 | 30 |
| Servers in the pool | 25 | 75 | 150 |
| TLS certificates | 10 | 25 | 50 |
| Open connections | 10,000 | 20,000 | 40,000 |
| Traffic included, Europe | 20 TB | 20 TB | 20 TB |
| Traffic included, US and Singapore | 1 TB | 2 TB | 3 TB |
| Health checks | Active and passive | Active and passive | Active and passive |
| Sticky sessions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Public IPv4 and IPv6 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic failover | Yes | Yes | Yes |
A service is one listening port and the rule behind it, so a site on 80 and 443 uses two. Servers in the pool may sit in different data centres, as long as they are in the same region as the balancer.
We build it, you keep running your application
Load balancers sit alongside our unmanaged cloud servers, so the split is the same one: the platform is ours, what runs on your servers is yours.
We look after
- Creating the balancer and pointing it at your servers
- The services, ports and health checks you ask for
- Installing your TLS certificates and swapping them when they change
- Adding and removing servers from the pool when you tell us
- The balancer's own redundancy and failover
You look after
- Your DNS record pointing at the balancer's address
- The application on each server, and keeping the pool in step
- Sessions and uploads, so a visitor can land on any server
- Your database, whether shared or replicated
- Telling us when a server should come out of rotation
Individual requests are not logged, for privacy and performance, so the balancer cannot produce a per-request access log. Your own servers still log everything they answer.
The rest of the platform
WebSols Cloud Servers
The unmanaged NVMe servers that sit behind the balancer, with root access and monthly pricing.
Read more →Managed Cloud Servers
The same servers, run for you, with a control panel, security, backups and 24/7 support.
Read more →Cloud Hosting
Autoscaling shared hosting, when a pool of servers is more than you need.
Read more →Load balancers, answered
What people ask before putting one in front of their servers.
When do I need a load balancer?
When one server is no longer enough, or when you cannot afford for one server's failure to take the site down. Below that, a single server with backups is simpler and cheaper.
When do I need a load balancer?
When one server is no longer enough, or when you cannot afford for one server's failure to take the site down. Below that, a single server with backups is simpler and cheaper.
Put your servers behind one address
Tell us how many servers you run and what they serve, and we will size the balancer, set up the health checks and install your certificate.