The company's load balancing technology increases aggregate server throughput and concurrent connections allowing more traffic to customer sites.

The Planet, a privately held dedicated hosting company, today launched shared load balancing for its virtual rack solution. It says that based on Foundry ServerIron technology, the new product offers the same benefits of traditional load balancers, with introductory pricing starting $75 per month.

The company articluates that with shared load balancing, it leverages a network device shared by several virtual rack customers, offering the same scalability and redundancy as a dedicated load balancer. By using load balancing technology, aggregate server throughput and the number of concurrent connections are increased, which allows more traffic at higher speeds to customer sites, it avers.

"With the approaching holiday season, businesses – especially e-commerce companies – will begin to see spikes in site traffic," said Bryce Edwards, The Planet's general manager for complex infrastructure. "With shared load balancing, customers will see enhanced server performance as traffic volumes increase. Load balancing can be cost-prohibitive, often doubling the price of a server, which can inhibit adoption. Our customers are price sensitive, so we've carefully evaluated technologies to make our new shared product a cost-effective solution for most any business."