Linode's NodeBalancer supports SSL to help customers manage secure incoming connections
The November edition of the Business Review USA is now live!
Linode, an established leader in cloud hosting, today announced enhancements to its cloud-based load balancer service that simplify the configuration and operation of securely served websites that need to transmit sensitive data. E-commerce and other secure (https) websites using Linode servers now have more flexibility in administering and distributing workloads.
"As our Dark Sky and Forecast apps grew rapidly in popularity, NodeBalancer was the obvious solution for distributing incoming traffic intelligently across our backend servers," said Jason LaPorte, Founder of Dark Sky LLC. “Linode allowed us to easily scale to multiple servers right when we needed to. NodeBalancer is much more efficient at SSL-termination than our own systems are and when switching to NodeBalancer, our web server fell to below half its previous utilization before we even added a second web server. We couldn't be happier and plan to stick with the NodeBalancer for the foreseeable future.”
NodeBalancer can now automatically terminate and switch secure socket layer (SSL) connections. Administrators enjoy the same functionality and performance they have in http mode. In the same way that Linode’s NodeBalancer provides point-and-click high availability for scaling, administrators can employ point-and-click SSL termination when they want to load balance secure connections.
From the NodeBalancer API administrators can select https protocol from the drop-down menu, and then provide an authorized certificate and its private encryption key. Administrators can also generate their own certificate or use chained certificates. Traffic to secure connections is then managed and balanced automatically without site visitors needing to view certificate warning screens.
“E-commerce sites are among the most heavily trafficked sites on the Web, and capably balancing server workloads to optimize efficiency can be critical to the bottom line,” said Christopher Aker, founder and CEO of Linode. “With NodeBalancer SSL, users can efficiently distribute workloads that require the transmission of sensitive data—such as credit card and banking information—so when traffic spikes they take full advantage of online sales opportunities.”
Linode’s NodeBalancer is priced at $19.95/month, and automatically scales up to 10,000 concurrent connections. There is no additional cost for the SSL-supported upgrade.
