8 years delivering great infrastructure solutions

Like a number of great companies Loadbalancer.org is the result of an engineer 'scratching an itch'. All of our appliances are designed to deliver high performance, high-availability load balancing on great hardware with fantastic support.

Loadbalancer.org is holding its ground against a large number of new competitors in a stable and somewhat 'old hat' technology sector. The company has a good reputation for being honest with no nonsense and easy to use high performance products. This has enabled strong growth and exceptional traction with networking professionals due to its high quality elegant design and, unusually for a commercial appliance, full root system access.

Cheap, Powerful & Effective

OK... so marketing hate us using the word 'cheap', and to be honest we're not that cheap, £4,995 is a fair bit of cash for a pair of high-availability load balancers. Especially as its based on 'free' (free as in 'freedom' not free as in beer) software.

What you're paying for is the fact that this appliance is tried tested and battle hardened on a lot of big web sites run by talented people who want results not marketing gimmicks.

Partners you can trust.
We use high quality, high performance servers from Supermicro,Inc. & Dell Inc. System integration, assembly, testing, distribution & maintenance is then handled by Armari Ltd.

What's our company vision?
As CEO I've always believed in only releasing products that work, are easy to use and don't have any non-useful bells and whistles.

Why Open Source?
As the great Linus says "I just use what works". About 30% of our customers use completely open source back ends and the other 70% use a mixture of proprietary back ends (Apple, Windows, Solaris, AIX, Oracle etc). I'm not a Linux zealot personally, but I like how it works and for a network appliance it's the business. Windows 2003 server is a fantastic piece of work and hard to beat in an enterprise environment. A load balanced cluster of Microsoft Terminal Servers is a great way to run a business.

What are the core software elements of the Loadbalancer.org platform?
Loadbalancer.org has been utilizing Linux Virtual Server (LVS) for 6 years and have never found any bugs or performance issues with the code. We have made a couple of modifications that have been fed back into the community for better integration with layer 7 software stacks. We combine the excellent LVS with HA-Linux  for high-availability and unlike other vendors we always ship a null modem cable to ensure the high-availability communication path is reliable. For health checking we use a highly customised version of Ultramonkey which has a good developer community. 

Our Layer 7 functionality such as SNAT, cookie insertion and URL switching is provided by the extremely fast HaProxy combined with Pound for SSL termination. We are always on the lookout for new technologies and are considering the use of nginx, stunnel , mod_proxy and many other open source projects.

What is different about the Loadbalancer.org hardware platforms?
Loadbalancer.org has used various commodity server platforms and we like the Supermicro servers because of their excellent build quality, flexibility and reliability. Originally we used IDE flash adapter / Compact flash combinations to give more reliability than hard drive based units. However after being stung with a couple of batches of unreliable flash cards we have moved to transcend DOM (Disk on module) units with integrated ECC checking.

Some of our customers require 24*7 4 hour on-site hardware support and we provide this by utilizing Dell hardware for worldwide on-site engineer maintenance. This provides you, the customer, with the best of both worlds. Tried and tested Loadbalancer.org software with worldwide 4 hour on-site hardware warranty.