Server load balancing

We primarily work with and suggest a hardware based solution in the form of a ServerIron XL load balancer by Foundry. The purpose of a load balancer is to distribute requests going to a group of servers all hosting the same website. If one of the servers goes down, the load balancer stops sending clients so the end user will not notice. These hardware load balancers ship with 100Mbps ports but can be upgraded to gigabit if need be. We have found them to be incredibly stable and can be setup in a redundant manner with 2 if very high availability is needed.