Bringing Affordable Server Load Balancing to Managed Hosting, Co-Location, and ASP

For service providers engaged in providing managed hosting, co-location and co-hosting services, ability to provide profitable, value-added functionality that ensures optimum performance, high-availability and scalability of their customers’ applications is rapidly becoming a necessity, rather than an option. Customers, large and small, have quickly realized that a properly functioning site that is continuously up-and-running, while providing optimum performance, is the key factor to the success of any web and e-commerce application initiative.

Users of their sites must have a consistently positive experience, both in terms of performance and accessibility. Sluggishness in performance or inability to complete a transaction for any reason will invariably cause users to go elsewhere, with potentially disastrous results to their bottom-line.

During the past five years, application delivery controllers and server load balancers have emerged as one of the most important technologies in solving the problem of performance and accessibility for web and e-commerce applications. In its most basic form, a load balancer provides the ability to direct users to the best performing, accessible server. Should one of the servers (or applications on that server) become inaccessible, the load balancer will take that server off-line, while automatically re-routing users to other functioning servers. In addition, using various load balancing algorithms, an intelligent load balancer can distribute users to servers that offer the best possible performance by dynamically interrogating key server elements such as number of concurrent connections and CPU/memory utilization. To further enhance the user experience, advanced load balancers can provide SSL acceleration by offloading encryption/decryption processes from the e-commerce application servers, thereby dramatically increasing their performance, while decreasing the time and costs associated with certificate management and administration.

To satisfy the needs of their existing customers, and to attract new customers, larger ISPs began to provide their clients with dedicated or shared access to server load balancing appliances. However, at an average cost of over $40,000 per each redundant configuration, deploying intelligent server load balancing required fairly deep pockets. Further, in order to be able to provide this service to their clients at an affordable monthly fee, an ISP would require several years to amortize their investment to achieve a positive ROI.

However, that has all changed with KEMP Technologies’ introduction of the LoadMaster. Integrating powerful, stable, full-featured application delivery and server load balancing with the latest advancements in layer-7 content switching and SSL acceleration technologies, KEMP has created an ideal product for the ISPs that serve small-to-medium sized businesses that need to provide optimum performance and 99.999% availability to their customers’ applications. For larger ISPs, the LoadMaster provides an opportunity for significantly reduced acquisition costs, while substantially increasing their ROI.

At a starting price of only $2,490, including 1st year support, the LoadMaster family of products brings advanced application delivery and server load balancing technology that is accessible to every ISP. It will also bring greater customer satisfaction.