Since day one we’ve been using DNS to load balance customer connections to our farm. This has worked well and we’ve been happy with it over the years. As we’ve grown we’ve noted one downside and that’s the excessive use of IP addresses as we grow. This issue is compounded as we add resellers. Basically each front-end requires an IP per reseller. When you’re growing as fast as we are it adds up quickly. So…

Today we started moving over to a redundant hardware solution using DSR (direct server return). In addition to using a lot less IPv4 addresses, we also get a few more benefits from the new setup. We’ll be able to preform maintenance on front-end servers easier (without having to wait for DNS to update) and we expect the load to be more uniformly balanced over the front-ends. We don’t expect the change to be noticeable to end users but please report any issues you experience.