Stop Losing Users: The Load-Balancing Fix Your Website Needs

If a website loads slowly, it takes little time for someone to give up and leave. Nearly 47% of internet users will bounce if a page takes more than two seconds to load.

Yes, you read that correctly. A website must function and grab visitors’ attention in just a few seconds.

Why bring up this surprising statistic? Load balancers play a vital role in optimizing website load times to retain user sessions. A load-balancing solution helps create a responsive, robust, reliable, and secure application experience for users. That is, a scalable load balancer within an organization is responsible for maintaining user access to the application. This helps prevent users from leaving due to poor performance or, worse, an outage.

Picture yourself in line to see a new movie on the opening night. The movie theater usher directs customers to a ticket booth. The line is moving slowly, and you will inevitably miss the start of the movie. You are tempted to step out of the queue and go home, but then the line begins to move forward. The usher (load balancer) directs customers to the additional booths now open to serve them. This action allows all customers the time to not only purchase tickets. Still, it will enable them to visit the concession stand for popcorn and candy before the start of the movie, therefore providing an enjoyable experience at the theater.

We have all experienced something like the movie theater analogy, but the outcome may not always be as positive. Having 14 years of experience with application delivery,

There have never been higher expectations of the load balancer in the application stack.  That is why the load balancer is vital for our business-critical applications, providing high availability, scalability, performance, and much more.

Provide Availability, Reliability, Performance and Security

At its core, a load balancer redistributes traffic across servers to reduce resource strain, helping to maintain high availability and improve reliability and performance for solutions required to operate the business. This can include web applications, as mentioned earlier, but it often includes other solutions such as storage, virtual desktop (VDI) environments, secure file transfer, email, and API access, to name a few. High availability for these solutions reduces the risk of failure and allows for more seamless rerouting to different servers to maintain the necessary uptime.

An Application Delivery Controller (ADC) functions similarly to a load balancer, but its functions extend beyond essential load balancing.

For example, an organization with distributed data centers would need Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) functionality to support high availability for its key applications. Distributing traffic across multiple locations will not only increase performance by allowing more systems to respond to user requests, but it also adds a level of site resilience in the event an entire data center were to go offline due to a power outage or some other catastrophic event. This approach often includes multiple on-premises data centers and public clouds.

GSLB can also improve application performance when you have data centers across different continents or cloud regions and want users to be directed to the location closest to them to improve the user experience. With location-based or proximity-based steering, this can be easily accomplished, and it still provides a failover if the site of choice is unavailable.

Another example of how the ADC extends beyond load balancing is its ability to pre-authenticate users prior to sending the connection to the application servers. This approach adds a layer of security, preventing any connection attempts to the actual servers without confirmation that the user is permitted to access the application. This aligns with Zero Trust principles that can be applied through the ADC, which include authentication.

Staying with the security element provided by the ADC, a Web Application Firewall (WAF) can also be enabled to protect the published application from threat actors. This can be accomplished by terminating the traffic on the ADC, examining the request to verify its legitimacy, and blocking any malicious traffic sent to the application.

I’ve been allowed to speak with many customers over the years, and as the complexity and requirements for their applications have grown, it was essential for load balancers to adapt. This additional functionality above and beyond your typical load balancer is just scratching the surface of what value ADCs can provide for business applications. Today we continue to innovate to provide customers with the features and tools necessary to help them exceed user expectations.

Application Load Balancing Is Crucial

The user experience for any application is directly tied to a server’s high availability, reliability, performance, and security. Load balancing solutions and ADCs maintain those to support an ideal user experience.

Circling back to our movie scenario where lines are long, customers are impatient, and you only want to enjoy a night at the theater. If the usher could not efficiently distribute the line across multiple ticket booths, many of the customers would have left the queue and gone home upset about the experience, not to mention the significant loss of ticket sales felt by the theater. The same goes for our business; without a load balancer or ADC to manage connections to the applications effectively, users will have an unfavorable experience, causing them to leave the website and have to wait more than two seconds for a page to load.

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