What is load balancing and how does it improve website availability?
A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple backend servers, preventing any single server from being overwhelmed. If one server goes down, the load balancer automatically routes traffic to healthy servers — eliminating single points of failure. Types: Round-robin (distribute requests equally), least-connections (send to server with fewest active connections), IP-hash (same client always hits same server — useful for sessions). Implement on Connect Quest using Nginx as load balancer (upstream block) in front of 2+ application servers, or use a cloud load balancer. Session persistence: if your app stores sessions locally (not Redis), use IP-hash so users don't lose their session when hitting different servers. Health checks: configure Nginx to mark servers as down after failed health checks. For high-availability WordPress, combine load balancer + shared NFS storage for uploads + Redis for sessions + shared MySQL. Scale your architecture with Connect Quest cloud plans at connectquest.co.in.