In a world of digital natives, speed is a valuable commodity. In fact, 40% of people will abandon a website that tends to take longer than three seconds to load, according to Neil Patel. When looking to build a thriving business in this age, cloud computing is nothing short of a friend.
While cloud computing promises many benefits, it will only be as effective in helping run your business as the resources that you allocate to it. In the case of seasons of high traffic or even increased stress on your resources, you can easily under-deliver your intended quality to your customers. It can be quite easy for clients to be plagued with long waiting times which can lead to the eventual loss of your customers.
In such situations, having a load balancer can turn out to be a valuable asset. Here is why utilizing a load balancer will improve the quality of services you offer your customers:
Load Balancing In A Nutshell
It is typical to have multiple similar resources on the cloud such as virtual machines as well as isolated storage spaces. However, most of these resources will be interconnected. While having a resource overused will increase the lead time of your business’s services, having one that is underused will mean that you are wasting financial resources on that specific investment.
A load balancer ensures that your load – traffic, memory capacity or CPU usage – is well distributed within your different resources. This will ensure that you neither over-utilize your cloud backup solutions for small business nor end up having under-utilized resources. It helps to avoid instances of downtime that can result from CPU utilization or the loss of backed up data due to excessive stress on the memory capacity.
It Helps Handle Traffic in the Peak Seasons
In peak business seasons, traffic is bound to double if not triple. This means that the same resources that you enjoy during the normal season are now likely to be over-utilized by the increased traffic. In case this entire load is exerted to a single server, you will have to be plagued with long load times as it will take longer for the servers to handle a single transaction.
Additionally, such stress on your network resources can result in adverse effects such as packet loss which can further make communication difficult within your organization. With a load balancer, you can subdivide the traffic among your servers and network resources. This will ensure that you receive optimized results from these resources within the shortest time possible.
It Will Improve Flexibility
Your business needs to be ready to face any risks whenever they hit. This is the only way you can truly be consistent with offering quality services. From time to time, it is quite easy to lose some part of your network or even simply have it under maintenance.
When such resources are offline, you will typically need to switch to the other resources. When taking virtual machines as an example, once a single machine goes offline, you have to transfer the load to the remaining resources. A load balancer will offer you the flexibility to automatically transfer your load to the remaining virtual machines.
It Will Improve Performance and Cost Optimization
Impaired performance can easily increase the cost of running your organization since it will take more time to cater to the needs of your clients. While it would normally take an hour to get done with a single project, it might take as long as three hours to do the same. The lost potential earning cannot be recovered, and it will only be tougher to cater for the typical workload in the long run.
Even worse, you might have under-utilized resources that can help to speed up how you run your organization. With an optimized usage of all your cloud resources, you can enjoy making the most out of every investment you have.
Conclusion
Convenience is a commodity you need to be ready to sell to your customers. Luckily, having a load balancer ensures that you can offer just that. Consider investing in one to enjoy the above and more benefits.