---
description: Distribute traffic across multiple servers for reliability and performance.
title: Balance traffic across origins
image: https://developers.cloudflare.com/og-docs.png
---

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# Balance traffic across origins

Last updated Aug 25, 2026|Copy as Markdown|[View as Markdown](https://4f1c5cd2.previews.developers.cloudflare.com/use-cases/performance/load-balancing/index.md)|[Agent setup](https://4f1c5cd2.previews.developers.cloudflare.com/agent-setup/)

If a single origin server handles all your traffic, any failure or overload takes your application offline. Cloudflare's load balancing distributes traffic across multiple origins with health checks and automatic failover.

## Solutions

### Load balancing

Distribute traffic across origins with health checks and failover. [Learn more about load balancing](https://4f1c5cd2.previews.developers.cloudflare.com/load-balancing/).

* **Traffic distribution** \- Spread incoming load across multiple origin servers using weighted or latency-based policies
* **Failover** \- Reroute traffic to healthy origins instantly when a server fails its health check
* **Geographic steering** \- Route users to the nearest or best-performing origin based on latency or geography

### Health checks

Monitor origin server health and availability. [Learn more about health checks](https://4f1c5cd2.previews.developers.cloudflare.com/health-checks/).

* **Health monitoring** \- Continuously probe origins and automatically remove unhealthy servers from rotation

## Get started

1. [Create a load balancer](https://4f1c5cd2.previews.developers.cloudflare.com/load-balancing/get-started/)
2. [Configure health checks](https://4f1c5cd2.previews.developers.cloudflare.com/health-checks/get-started/)
3. [Set up steering policies](https://4f1c5cd2.previews.developers.cloudflare.com/load-balancing/understand-basics/traffic-steering/)

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