About load balancing and synchronization
If there is heavy Web and FTP traffic on an organization's Web site, load balancing helps distribute these requests across multiple hosting servers based on how busy the server is. It helps preventing a single hosting server from getting overwhelmed with requests from such a busy Web site.
Load balancing requires two or more hosting servers connected to the external network through a load-balancing software or hardware device. This load-balancing setup will provide access to applications or resources as though it is a single server, with all of the hosting servers actively serving requests at the same time.
Whenever you make any changes in the load-balanced organization using the control panel, these changes are implemented on the organization's primary hosting server (resource) and then they are synchronized with the secondary load-balanced resource. Therefore, these changes are visible on both primary and secondary resources.
A load-balanced organization is synchronized from the primary to the secondary resource, when:
Any Windows Web Hosting service component, such as IIS FTP service, is added, edited, or removed using the control panel.
Any organization user is added, changed, or removed using the control panel.
When the organization administrator clicks the initiate synchronization button in the control panel. If an organization's configuration is not in sync between the primary and the secondary resources, clicking this button triggers a synchronization of its configuration from the primary to the secondary resource.
Important: Since the synchronization always happens from the primary resource to the secondary resource, only the changes done on the primary resource are copied to the secondary resource. If you make any changes on the secondary resource, these changes are lost as soon as the synchronization starts. You can use Microsoft® FrontPage® to publish content for the load-balanced organization either through the primary or secondary resource, since the content is finally stored on the NAS server. But if you use FrontPage's advanced features, such as creating subsites, through the secondary resource, then these changes will be lost as soon as the synchronization starts.
You can perform the following tasks to use the load balancing feature:
Add a new organization with load-balanced Windows Web Hosting service
Promote an existing non-load-balanced organization to a load-balanced organization
Demote a load-balanced organization to a non-load-balanced organization