Load balancing is a computer networking methodology to distribute workload across multiple
computers or a computer cluster or other resources, to achieve optimal resource utilization,
maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload.

Some of the Features of a Load Balancer :

Asymmetric load: A ratio can be manually assigned to cause some backend servers to get a greater
share of the workload than others. This is sometimes used as a crude way to account for some
servers having more capacity than others and may not always work as desired.

Priority activation: When the number of available servers drops below a certain number, or load gets too
high, standby servers can be brought online

HTTP caching: the load balancer can store static content so that some requests can be handled without
 contacting the web servers.

Firewall: direct connections to backend servers are prevented, for network security reasons Firewall
 is a set of rules that decide whether the traffic may pass through an interface or not.

Content-aware switching: most load balancers can send requests to different servers based on the URL being requested.

The following two are important methods to balance a server load:

DNS round robin
Hardware load balancers.

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