To ensure the uptime of your website during high traffic, it is advised to assign multiple origins for your website and apply an appropriate load balancing method.
To configure your origin load balancing method, navigate to ‘ Multi CDN’ > ‘General Settings’ > ‘Origin Address’.
You need to set the target domain from the ‘ Operation level panel’.
On this ‘Origin Address’ box, click the ‘ Settings’ (gear) icon to configure the setting.
First, you must change the origin address of your specified domain to IPv4.
Second, assign at least 2 IPv4 addresses. You can press the ‘+’ button to add more IPv4 addresses.
Load balancing features only work with IPv4. Assigning multiple FQDNs to your origin is not a good practice.
Finally, you can change the origin load balancing method to either IP hash or Round-robin.
- IP hash load balancing uses a hash algorithm that takes the source and destination IP address of the client and server to generate a unique hash key. This key is used to allocate a specific client to a particular server. When requests for sessions for the domain name associated with the server from the given client are received, all requests from the same client will be forwarded to the same server. Meaning, this method can persist session information.
- Round-robin load balancing uses multiple identical servers configured with the same domain name, but each has a unique IP address. When requests for sessions for the domain name associated with the servers are received, the requests are allocated in a random or rotating sequential manner. For example, the first request gets the IP address of server 1, the second request gets the IP address of server 2, and so on, with requests starting again at server 1 when all servers have been assigned an access request during a cycle.
- Failover load balancing uses a primary server to be available as the default server where all requests will be routed, while reserving a secondary servers to be on standby. Requests will only be routed to a secondary server if the primary server becomes unavailable (i.e. becomes unhealthy, or experiences downtime).
The load balancing features are Origin Shield performance enhancement features. Hence, you need to activate the Origin Shield first. Follow this link to learn how to activate Origin Shield.