What are the differences between "Load Balancing" and enabled cloudflare proxy status for one domain on different IPs?

Website, Application, Performance DNS & Network
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Hi there,
It is necessary to understand the essential differences between:
Paid service Load Balancing,
and
free possibility to just add additional IP for domain and enable Cloudflare cloud (orange).
Best regards

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not a full answer but some of the difference is the load balancing service have:

  • Health checks and auto failover
  • faster failover(dns changes take time)
  • steer traffic based on weight
  • dynamically steer traffic to the fastest pool

from my experience the load balancing is so cheap its not worth not to use it

1 Like
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But when I enable Cloudflare for one domain with two IP’s and one server is down, isn’t Cloudflare route all traffic only to one IP(up server)?
And if I’m right, why we can’t named it “helthcheck’s and auto failover” ?
Thanks and best regards

4

from my knowledge no… I found cf doc that also state it:

What are the drawbacks of Round-Robin DNS?

The round-robin method doesn’t always provide evenly-distributed load balancing because of both DNS caching and client-side caching. If a user makes a DNS query to a particularly high trafficrecursive resolver for a particular website, that resolver will cache the website’s IP, potentially sending a heavy amount of traffic to that one IP.

Another drawback is that round-robin cannot be depended upon for site reliability; if one of the servers goes down, the DNS server will still keep that server’s IP in the round-robin rotation. So if there are 6 servers and one is taken offline, one in six users will be denied service. In addition, round-robin DNS does not account for server load, transaction time, geographical distance, and other factors that traditional load balancing can be configured for.

Some advanced round-robin services have methods to overcome a few of the drawbacks, such as the ability to detect unresponsive servers and take them out of the round-robin rotation, but there is no way around the caching issue. Many DNS providers, like Cloudflare DNS support round-robin DNS.

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