According to an announcement Monday by Plano, Texas-based SoftLayer, its new load balancing service stores content and applications in a cluster of servers distributed across the company's data centers in Dallas, Seattle and Washington DC, where load balancing hardware monitors the health of each clustered server. Each load balancer directs a request for content using advanced algorithms to choose "the healthiest server in the best location relative to where the content will be delivered," according to the company's statement.

"This is the power of our seamless infrastructure and geographic diversity intertwined," SoftLayer director of information systems Jacob Linscott said in a statement. "Regardless of their size or business, any of our customers can use it to improve their availability and performance."

SoftLayer said clients can use SoftLayer's Global Server Load Balancing service to gain higher scalability, availability and predictability. Those hosting applications and services benefit because new servers can be added to clusters as demand increases and user requests are always routed to an available server, ensuring critical applications will remain available for user requests.

This service has a starting price of $99 per month, which includes service for one domain and up to eight Web servers.

Global server load balancing joins additional SoftLayer services that utilize the company's geographically diverse infrastructure, including its geographically-redundant Anycast DNS service which in late August the company began offering for free to all customers using SoftLayer DNS servers.