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Load Balancing
Maximize application performance and availability
Overutilized or geographically distant servers add latency and degrade the user experience. Such mistakes can prove costly, resulting in lost customers, missed revenue, and reputational damage.
With Load Balancing, you can improve application performance and availability by steering traffic away from unhealthy origin servers and dynamically distributing it to the most available and responsive server pools.
View plans and pricing for Load Balancing.
Manage from a unified control plane
Manage global and local traffic in a complex infrastructure environment from one place — the Cloudflare Dashboard. Intelligently route your traffic based on geography, latency, and availability.
Increase reliability with fast failover
Route your visitors away from unhealthy origins and failover instantly with zero downtime. As soon as an origin or pool goes down, requests proxied through Cloudflare get instantly re-routed — without waiting for TTLs to expire.
Reduce your total cost of ownership
Gain operational agility and reduce capital expenditure by replacing on-premise load balancing hardware with an enterprise-grade, cloud-based load balancing solution — all delivered and billed as a service.
Connect to the Global Network
Load Balancing runs at each of our data centers across 300 cities worldwide and is powered by our DDoS-resilient DNS — the fastest Authoritative DNS in the world. Our global Anycast network is 15x bigger than the largest DDoS attack ever recorded and ensures that traffic continues to get routed even under stress. We support load balancing for both proxied and non- proxied traffic.
"The combination of Load Balancing’s geolocation steering and Cloudflare’s caching makes sure customers are getting the fastest load times possible."
Nigel Hepworth
Managing Director
Load Balancing Pricing
Free, Pro, and Business Plan pricing:
Base Fee:
- Up to 2 origin servers: $5 per month
- Additional origins, up to 20: $5 per month per origin
Usage-based Fees:
- First 500k DNS requests are free
- $0.50 per every 500k DNS requests after
Enterprise Plan pricing:
Base Fee:
- Custom Pricing
Usage-based Fees:
- Custom Pricing
- Negotiated reduced rate lower than $0.50
Key Features
The Cloudflare advantage
Active Health Monitoring
Actively monitor the health of your pools to detect outages and eliminate potential downtime. Classification of a pool as unhealthy can be based on an extensive set of user-configurable parameters. Health checks can be conducted as often as every 10 seconds through periodic HTTP/HTTPS requests, with reports delivered via email notifications or REST API.
Detailed Traffic Analytics
Get a granular view of your traffic — identify which origins and pools are being selected for your traffic and why, so you can gather insights to optimize your infrastructure. See visualizations of your traffic demands on load balancers, pools, and origins over variable time ranges.
Real-Time Latency Maps
Create real-time maps to analyze the responsiveness of all your origins around the world, no matter where they are hosted — on-prem, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. Identify the regions where requests are underperforming, so you can timely investigate the cause of failure.
Multi-Cloud Support
Cloudflare Load Balancing fits seamlessly into a multi-cloud environment, enabling you to avoid costly vendor lock-ins. Using a vendor-agnostic load balancer increases the fault tolerance of your architecture by safeguarding your applications from disruptions caused by any single provider. Upon detecting an outage or connectivity issues with any cloud provider, Cloudflare Load Balancing automatically routes your traffic to healthy servers.
Session Affinity
Maintain session affinity by binding a user's session to a specific origin, ensuring that all requests during the session are sent to the same origin. This helps maintain critical session information and enables a seamless, uninterrupted user experience.
Easy Configuration
We make configuring and managing load balancing simple. You can set up a fully-functioning load balancing infrastructure within minutes using the Cloudflare Dashboard or REST API. No additional hardware or software required. You also get the flexibility of adding or removing origins to load balancers as your traffic scales.
Cloudflare's Load Balancing Analytics gives our team a granular lens into where our traffic is going, across multiple origin servers and geographic locations. This allows us to look at load and latency trends over time, making sure there are no single areas of the system that may act as a bottleneck.
Bobby Samanian
Director, System Operations
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