Cloudflare Load Balancing is POWERFUL.

Hey guys! If you're looking to keep your websites blazing fast and ultra-reliable, Cloudflare Load Balancing is the secret sauce you need. Let's break down its awesomeness and what it'll cost you in 2024.

Key Features

Global and Local Load Balancing: Spread your traffic worldwide or keep it local, ensuring users always get the quickest response times. Global Traffic Management (GTM) is available as an add-on feature to the self-serve plan, while Local Traffic Management (LTM), I believe, is an Enterprise-only feature (Ouch!)

Health Checks: Automatically checks your servers' health and reroutes traffic away from any that are down.

Automatic Failover: No more panicking over server crashes—Cloudflare redirects traffic to healthy servers instantly.

Geographic Routing: Users are sent to the nearest data center for snappier load times.

Session Affinity: Keeps users’ sessions on the same server for a smoother experience.

DNS-Based Load Balancing: Integrates with Cloudflare’s super-fast DNS for efficient traffic distribution.

Custom Traffic Steering: Fine-tune how traffic flows based on proximity, latency, or location.

Analytics and Insights: Get detailed reports on traffic patterns and server performance.

Pricing

Load Balancing is available as incremental costs to the self-serve plan you have subscribed for your websites/apps. It's charged based on the number of origin servers, check frequency, check regions, and how you want to steer your traffic.

It starts as low as $5 per month, with 2 origin servers, health check every 60 seconds from one region, and random or failover traffic steering.

Let's say you have 6 servers for geographic steering and want to check every 15 seconds from two regions, that's $60 per month. Still not too bad huh?

It's also charged based on traffic. The first 500,000 queries, shared across all Load Balancers in your account, are free. Additional usage beyond that is charged at 50 cents per 500,000 requests per website/app.

Cloudflare Load Balancing is the go-to for keeping your site fast and reliable. Whether you're a startup or a big enterprise, Cloudflare’s got you covered with top-notch features and pricing to fit your needs.