Distributing web traffic to various servers?

Question

Something I have been curious about for quite sometime now.

How exactly do you distribute your web traffic to various servers? And when do you know when to distribute to another server?

For sites like Facebook, they have one point of entry via the domain www.facebook.com so if server A is running at 90% of what it can or whatever how does it know to switch to server X or to use a server closer to your location. How exactly does it achieve this.

And when building a website that will have large traffic how do you deal with this. Is this something you consider as a developer?

More information you can provide the better.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You probably want to look into load balancing

If you have specific questions beyond that, they're probably more suitable for server fault