Load Balancing Options

Discussion in 'Pre-sales questions' started by MartinK, Mar 6, 2014.

  1. Hello:

    We are considering several hosting providers and Winhost is attractive because of its speciality within the Microsoft Stack, ASP.net, the ability to run under full trust,etc. However we are looking for an affordable solution which also is scalable regarding request handling.

    I looked through the knowledge base and forums and couldn't find any information on Load Balancing. Does Winhost not provide anyway to Load Balance requests between two front end IIS Servers? Is this not a common feature request? Any information on this topic would be great.

    We are definately willing to go with the max package if that makes any difference.

    Thanks in advance
     
  2. I'm afraid that we don't use any load balancing on our network at the moment.

    It is not a common feature request, I suspect since most people don't write apps that take a load balanced environment into consideration. As you know, a lot of things can break if you just throw an application at multiple servers without planning for multiple servers.
     
  3. I find it very surprising that this is not asked for frequently. Our MVC application does not use Session, is stateless where it needs to be, and also uses ajax/async processing where it also makes sense to scale out properly.

    I agree if people don't plan for it, you simply can't "add another front end", but I'd completely disagree that its not a requirement if your site is expecting high traffic. Scalability starts with proper design and implementation (building the application) and then is augmented by added the resources as required.

    We will consider other enterprise level hosting options. Thanks for the reply.
     
  4. I didn't mean to infer that load balancing is not important to high traffic sites, it certainly is.

    But it's just not something you will come across at traditional shared hosts like Winhost. I don't know of any host similar to us that uses it, I suspect because it would cause more problems that it would solve. Where customer bases like ours are concerned, anyway.

    When you talk about multiple instances of your site running on multiple load balanced servers, you're talking about a different tier/class of hosting. One that is considerably more expensive than Winhost.
     
    Last edited: Oct 14, 2015

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