When we launched our Ad-Sharing update which made sponsors default on all forums, we promised the revenue would “allow us to improve on the already high level of services”. We’re pleased to say that we’ve done just that:
We’ve run into a few problems over the past few months with web servers going down here and there. This was caused by an uneven distribution in load caused by using Round robin to balance the traffic. Round robin randomly selects from a pool of IP addresses and that is the server you land on. Problem here is that there is no load distribution and there is no failover protection.
The solution to this was simple, in theory; however, it would take time to test and develop and a lot of money to purchase the equipment. After consulting various network engineers, we looked into the Zeus ZXTM Load Balancer. Zeus ZXTM is a software suit that distributes requests for various TCP and UDP services based on specifications that you set for it.
What Zeus ZXTM would give us is a level of stability and redundancy on our web servers that has never been seen before by FreeForums.org and its users. By sending all requests to the Zeus ZXTM load balancing server, we are able to evenly distribute all requests over all web servers as well as redirect requests when a web server goes offline. This will make it impossible for a failed web server to ever be noticed by our viewers.
We made the final purchase this past Tuesday and all viewers are accessing FreeForums.org by way of the Zeus ZXTM load balancer. We couldn’t be happier 
February 17th, 2008 at 12:35 am
Great to see freeforums.org is going to be more stable from now on.
February 17th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Yes,thank you for making the forums more stable as well.
I’m seeing a lot less downtime,in fact durring the last few months I have not once saw it down,very helpfull.