Ask HN: What are the cheap options for reliable load balancing?

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I am looking for cheap options to load balance 2-3 nginx instances, all on vps's, traffic is mostly http for now but may add SSL down the road.

I've look at Linode Node Balancer, currently priced at 20$ per month.

Who are the other contenders at this price?

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Nginx. It is able to load balance HTTP/HTTPS servers in a reverse-proxy mode and lets you use the common strategies for choosing the upstream server. See for example https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-set-u....

Other options too look at are, HAProxy (level 4 or 7 load balancing) and Varnish.

Thanks for the input!

I agree Nginx does it and does it well. I've look at this option, getting another VPS and setup load balancing on it. The only things that worry me is having only one front-end.

As I mentioned in another comment DNS load balancing prevents having only one front-end.

In an ideal world you'd use a VLAN spanning locations, with a shared IP to point to the load-balancer.

The load-balancer would route to your real servers, nginx, in your case. I've had good success with ucarp for IP-moving, and both nginx and varnish for load-balancing. (Varnish allows me to do caching at the same time.)

Ucarp looks cool, will sure have a look. Thank you for the input.

I've used pound[0] in a previous life (peaking at ~22M requests/day). It's lightweight, awesome, and just works.

[0]: http://www.apsis.ch/pound/

Simplest is the DNS load balancing. You can define multiple A records for the same domain and you are good to go!

I agree DNS load balancing is very easy and free. I've also done it in the past. Thanks for the input!

We are using HAProxy and I can highly recommend it.

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