 Hi there. Welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Roestel here. I want to do a video today about load balancers or load balancing riders and why they can be fantastic additions to your home networking setup. Now, the first thing to say about load balancers is that they are definitely not standard pieces of home networking gear. If you're running a data center or an on-premises data center, load balancers are extremely commonplace and they're used to basically take incoming traffic and distribute that intelligently among a pool of servers on the other side of the load balancer. But in the realm of home networking, most people don't have them. Now, the reason for that is pretty simple. If you're watching this video from your home network, then there's a very good chance you have a router on your home network. The router actually contains two pieces of distinct networking gear. One piece is a modem and the second piece is a router. Now, what that device is doing is it's connecting to your internet source, whether that is DSL internet or even let's say fiber optic internet. And then it's distributing that between the wired and wireless devices on your network. Now, if you're just a regular internet user, then that's more than enough for your needs. It's great. Why you might want to use a load balancing router is you're looking at stepping things up a little bit and getting more than one internet connection around your house. Now, there's other reasons why you might want to have a load balancing router running on your network. You might want to, for instance, enforce bandwidth controls on certain devices running on your network. You might want to group certain local area devices into groups and add different properties to them. And these are all things that when you have that device running between your router and the device is being connected to the internet, it's really helpful. So a load balancer is basically like a conductor in an orchestra. If you're using multiple white area networks, and this is the use case I'm going to get onto, then it's the orchestra conductor that's going to be listening in on the traffic sources, bringing internet into your house, home office or just your office, and then distributing that among your local area devices. Now there's a few different things that your average load balancer can do. One of those is failover. So failover is basically where you have those multiple WAN connections. So if you've ever looked on the back of your internet router, you might have seen a port labeled LAN local area network and another port labeled WAN or labeled internet. Now a WAN port is connecting internet from an external source. And when you're connecting your internet devices into your load balancer, you're going to be sticking those into the WAN ports. Now once you have multiple WANs, that's why you'll often find load balancing routers called VPN routers or wired broadband routers or multi WAN routers. That's because your average home internet router only has one LAN port. It might even have no LAN ports, just have a modem in which you can hook up your internet. Now a load balancer has multi WANs. That allows you to connect multiple internet connectivity sources. So if you want to connect your ISP and you want to connect a cellular router or you want to connect two ISP lines plus satellite, well if you have a load balancing router that supports enough WAN ports, you can do all this. Once you have multiple WANs connected, you can do things as I said, like failover. Failover means that if you lose one connection, the internet's going to flip over to a second connection. So you're going to get no loss in connectivity. The second really nice thing about load balancers is that this will all work automatically. So you can set up in TP-Link load balancers backup rules that if you lose one connection, it'll go to connection two, or you'll have to lose connections one and two in order to get to connection three. And there's different manufacturers of load balancing routers out there. There's load balancers by MeakyTruck, there's load balancers by TP-Link, and there's load balancing routers by Ubiquity among others. One common area of confusion even among home network people is the difference between load balancing and bonding. Now in general load balancing routers can't do bonding. Bonding is a different thing. Bonding involves basically aggregating the bandwidth available from multiple connection sources so that everything connected to the network can avail of faster internet connectivity. Now there's one kind of tiny exception to that rule and that's if you're using something, an application that has multi-threading like you might have seen those connection tools or those download managing clients. And those have the functionality to draw in internet connectivity from multiple sources. So if you have a load balancer that supports that you might get a speed increase versus just having that application drawing internet from one connection, but it's still not the same thing as channel bonding and channel bonding requires that that is configured on the networking site as well, on the internet side, on the ISP side. So you can either get yourself something like a software solution like Speedify or you can use something like OpenMPTCPRouter and that's another solution for setting that up. But if you just have a load balancer running on your network out of the box, it's not going to be able to do channel bonding. Load balancing riders are generally speaking not super expensive. I picked up my TP-Link one for in the region of $100. Why might you want one on your network? Well, if you have a second connectivity source, whether you've got your two ISPs or you've got a cellular line in addition to your ISP or a satellite line, then you probably already heard about load balancing riders or you might already have one. But if you don't and you're running something like a home based business, you're working from home and you really don't want to have your internet going down when one line goes down, then in my opinion, signing up for a second source of internet connectivity, whether cellular or satellite, running those through a load balancing rider is a really, really smart investment. Final thing I want to say about load balancing riders, you can add gear on the local area network site of the rider. The way I have mine set up is that my ISP and cellular riders are connecting to load balancing rider. That's managing the failover, as I said, the bandwidth control, et cetera. And then on the other side, I have an ethernet switch and I have a Wi-Fi rider configured as an access point so that the wireless devices on my network and the wire devices both avail of improved connectivity. That's going to have that backup bandwidth control, et cetera. All those things automatically built into it. Hope this video is useful about load balancing riders. They're a great addition to home networks, especially if you're setting up multiple wide area network connectivity sources and you want to have really, really solid uninterrupted home internet connectivity. For instance, if you're running a business from home, great investments. Thank you for watching. And if you want to get more videos about everything related to technology, home networking, et cetera, please feel free to subscribe to this YouTube channel.