I’ve recently enabled load balancing on my website. I am using NGINX to load balance the site using the round-robin method. I created an additional web server, which allowed me to split the load on each Apache server. The main purpose of load balancing is to reduce the amount of load on each server, increasing my websites performance. Although, not entirely needed, enabling a load balance was an excellent way to learn about the technology.

Enabling NGINX was helpful in reducing each servers workload, however, it’s become very difficult to push updates out to my site as needed. I needed to log into each site, and manually upload an update. This took a while and delayed any fixes. The best solution was to centralize the root folders of the website. To accomplish this, I installed and setup an NFS file server on a CentOS Linux server.

Now all of the content on my site is updated on each server instantly!

Furthermore, the setup of these services allowed me to place the servers on a dedicated subnet. I’m using VLAN tags to monitor and separate the traffic across my home lab network. This enables greater security and allows better insight into my websites statistics.

Probably the most important aspect about this change is that I’ve finally documented my site on my internal wiki. I currently am using a privately hosted Doku wiki that contains the documentation for my network. Enabling load balancing required me to rebuild each server. I’ve now fully documented the process, meaning fixes and re-builds will be very easy in the future.