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Load Balancing Explained: How to Distribute Web Traffic with Nginx
Learn how load balancing works, explore Round Robin, Least Connections, and IP Hash, and configure Nginx to distribute incoming web traffic across multiple backend servers.
How to Distribute Traffic Across Multiple Servers Using Nginx
When I first started working with web applications, I used to think that making an application faster was mostly about writing better code, optimizing database queries, or upgrading server hardware.
Those things certainly help, but I eventually realized there was another problem worth understanding: what happens when too many users access the same application at the same time?
Imagine running a website on a single server. Everything works perfectly when only a few people visit. Pages load quickly, database queries complete without problems, and the server handles requests comfortably.
Then traffic increases.
More users start visiting the website, requests begin piling up, response times increase, and eventually the server struggles to keep up. In serious cases, the application may become unavailable.
This is where load balancing becomes important.
