As
the Web increasingly becomes a core element of business
strategy, so the task of hosting web content has become
mission critical. Few companies, however, have the resources,
money and expertise to build their web site entirely in-house.
For this reason, many businesses choose to outsource their
Web hosting to Internet service providers (ISP).
We
propose a new cost effective, content-aware load balancing
solution, called FLEX, for a shared web hosting service
implemented on a cluster. FLEX allocates hosted web sites
to different machines in the cluster based on the sites'
processing and memory requirements which are estimated using
the site logs. Appropriate routing of requests can be achieved
by using the DNS infrastructure, since each hosted web site
has a unique domain name.
Using
simulation based on real traces, we evaluate the potential
benefits of the new solution. FLEX solution shows superliner
speedup with increased number of nodes.
