Hi everyone,

I am trying to get my head around the concept of load balancing to ensure availability and redundancy to keep users happy when things go wrong, rather than load balancing for the sake of offering blistering speed to millions of users.

We're on a budget and trying to stick to the stuff where there's plenty of knowledge available, so running Apache on Ubuntu VPS's seems like the strategy until some famous search engine acquire us (Saturday irony included, please note).

At least to me, it's a complete jungle of different solutions available. Apaches own mod_proxy & HAproxy are two that we found by a quick google search, but having zero experience of load balancing, I have no idea of what would be appropriate for our situation, or what we would look after while choosing a solution to solve our availability concerns.

What is the best option for us? What should we do to get availability high whilst staying inside our budgets?