Load balancers

A load balancer gives several servers in the same location one address, and sends traffic only to servers that pass its health check. Load balancers are billed by the hour, per node.

Creating one

1. Choose Deploy › Load balancer, or Network › Load Balancers.

2. Name it, and pick a location and the number of nodes (1 to 3).

3. Optionally, pick the servers.

It starts by forwarding HTTP on port 80 to port 80 on your servers. It shows Starting while it comes up. Wait until it shows Running before making changes. Changes made sooner are queued and applied once it's ready.

Settings on its page

• Forwarding: listen with HTTP, HTTPS or TCP, and send to your servers' ports.

• HTTPS: get a free Let's Encrypt certificate for your domain. Point the domain's DNS at the load balancer's address first. Tick Send HTTP visitors to HTTPS to redirect.

• Firewall: limit who can reach it. With no rules, anyone can.

• Settings:

  • Balancing: Round robin or Least connections.

  • Backend network: public addresses, or a VPC.

  • Sticky sessions.

  • Health check: a server that fails 5 checks in a row stops getting traffic until it passes 5 again.

• Servers: choose which running cloud servers it sends to.

Destroying a load balancer releases its addresses for good. Your servers aren't affected.