Load balancer

A load balancer is a component that distributes incoming traffic ✕ Traffic is the amount of data your website transfers, determined by visitor numbers and page size. Some hosting plans cap monthly traffic. More in the glossary → across several servers offering the same service, so the load is spread evenly and no single machine gets overwhelmed. It acts as a traffic director placed in front of the servers: as user requests arrive, it decides which one to send each to, based on rules and on the state of each server ✕ A server is a powerful computer that provides data or services to other devices — for example serving a website or storing your cloud files. More in the glossary → . Its advantages are several: it improves speed by avoiding bottlenecks, increases the capacity to serve many visitors at once, and strengthens reliability, because it checks the health of the servers and stops sending traffic to any that fail (failover), keeping the site up. It is a key piece for making high-traffic websites and applications fast and resistant to outages.