Load Balancing for Self-Hosted Applications

What Is Load Balancing?

A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple instances of your application. If one instance goes down, traffic routes to the others. If traffic increases, you add more instances.

Why Load Balance?

High Availability

If your app runs on one server and that server crashes, it's down. With a load balancer and two servers, one can fail and users don't notice.

Performance

Two servers handle roughly twice the traffic of one. Load balancing lets you scale horizontally by adding more instances.

Zero-Downtime Deployments

Deploy updates to one instance at a time while others continue serving traffic. Users never see downtime.

Load Balancing Strategies

Round Robin

Send each request to the next server in the list. Simple and effective for stateless applications.

Least Connections

Send to the server with the fewest active connections. Better for workloads with varying request durations.

IP Hash

Route users to the same server based on their IP. Useful when you need session stickiness without shared session storage.

Weighted

Send more traffic to more powerful servers. Useful when servers have different specs.

Load Balancing Options

Caddy

TinyPod's reverse proxy supports upstream load balancing natively. Define multiple backends and Caddy distributes traffic.

Nginx

The most popular reverse proxy with advanced load balancing features.

HAProxy

Dedicated load balancer with extensive health checking and routing options.

DNS Load Balancing

Return multiple A records for a domain. Simple but lacks health checking — DNS will still send traffic to dead servers.

Do You Need Load Balancing?

Most self-hosted applications don't need load balancing. A single server with 4 cores and 8 GB RAM can handle thousands of concurrent users for typical web applications.

Consider load balancing when:

For most self-hosting scenarios, start with one server and add load balancing only when you have a real need.