5 reasons why you should never buy another load balancer

Are you looking to buy a load balancer to ensure your business is online all the time?

Companies often end up either paying too much for bandwidth they do not need or underestimating their requirement and lose on business due to the cost of outage. A recent World Data Bank survey points out an average of 6 hours lost every month globally and an associated loss of 4.75% of sales due to outages. Load balancing provides high availability, reliability and automatic failover for your network ensuring that your business remains online all the time. A bonded Internet provides all these benefits and much more at reduced costs.

Here are 5 reasons why you should never buy another load balancer but consider an alternative like a bonded Internet for your business.

1. Increased bandwidth

   Proprietary service vendors provide a bonded Internet, which is an aggregation of the total bandwidth of multiple networks viz. MPLS, fiber, DSL, cable, 4G, T1 that provide an increase in speed. It allows seamless failover and traffic is routed over available networks. A network A with 4MB bandwidth and network B 6MB gives a bonded connection with bandwidth of 10MB as compared to employing a load balancer that can provide 6MB as the maximum in this case.

2. Performance and reliability

  Performance increase is through data acceleration by applying data compression over a bonded connection. The bonded network creates a close to 100% uptime availability, as it is not dependent on a single point of failure. A backup wireless network is configured in case the bond fails entirely. A bonded Internet provides much more reliability compared to a load balancer.

3. Scalability with real time monitoring

  Additional network connections can be added as per your requirements making the bond scalable on demand to meet your business needs while suiting your budget. Services like real time monitoring, intrusion detection and centralized management of all connections provide additional value. The service provider can even monitor and troubleshoot problems off net connections and outside the LAN compared to a load balancer, which can only monitor traffic passing through it.

4. Quality of Service (QoS)

 In case of bonded Internet, packet order is maintained beyond the LAN – high priority traffic can be routed through a more favorable path and QoS can adapt to fluctuations in traffic volumes. Latency and jitter are avoided and give a real time uninterrupted experience on important services such as VOIP, video conferencing, streaming and instant messaging.

Load balancers, in comparison are just gateways for traffic exiting the LAN.

5. Same IP Failover and Lower costs

 Provides advanced fail over mechanism that allows customers to maintain their public IP address even if a network fails within the bond. There is no DNS round robin failover or TTL delays, which are associated with a load balancer – you do not even notice a glitch when any of the underlying networks has an outage. Bonded Internet provides additional value added services, which can help you reduce the need for skilled IT networking staff and drop costs.

Load balancers, on the contrary are expensive devices needing additional hardware, which need skilled IT staff to configure and monitor them.

Should you buy another load balancer?

   There is no need to buy another expensive load balancer – a bonded Internet will provide more benefits and you can scale up or down according to your budget.