Getting started with the Webdock Load Balancer
Last updated: July 8th 2025
Introduction
The Webdock Load Balancer - Powered by Blackwall Gatekeeper - is an on-premise Load Balancer solution which will forward any traffic you send to the Load Balancer IP address on the domain you enter. Furthermore, Gatekeeper will offload SSL Certificates so you don't have to worry about renewals as well as cache content for you at the edge for faster page loads.
Getting Started with the Load Balancer
To get started, simply fill out the form with all the required details. Once you hit submit, your Load Balancer will be created and will start setup once you update your DNS records, as shown on-screen.
In order to use the Load Balancer you should have an understanding of how DNS records work and how a Load Balancer is supposed to work as there are a lot of implementation details which rely on your upstream server responding properly to requests, as well as your domain DNS being correctly configured. If you feel you have set everything up correctly and you have any issues, feel free to contact Webdock Support and we will try and assist you any way we can.
You can manually enter ports if you toggle to the manual input mode for your upstream servers. Here you can enter any port in the format ipv4:port e.g. 65.65.45.65:8080 - just make sure you choose the appropriate communication protocol for the ports, that is whether it responds with SSL encryption or plain HTTP.
The Load Balancer tries very hard to keep session consistency
Sessions are maintained in the Webdock Load balancer by IP address. This means that if you visit your load balanced domain in a browser, you should hit the same upstream every time. This is not a bug, but a feature, as you would want to keep a user session on the same upstream server if possible, e.g. for web-shops so their cart doesn't suddenly disappear when the visitor hits another server on the same domain.
This can make testing your Load Balancer a bit hard, as any request you send from the same IP will hit the same upstream - you will not see your requests get bounced around your upstreams unless you send requests from different IP addresses.
What to do if Load Balancer setup doesn't complete in a timely manner
Depends, if it's SSL Certificate generation, you should allow at most 24 hours for the certificate to finalize, as you may have hit rate limits at Let's Encrypt for your domain which should clear within a 24 hour window.
In almost all other cases, if you do not see your Load Balancer in a functional state once DNS records have been added and verified, you should as the very first thing try to just edit your Load Balancer and hit the Update button, in order to force a reload of all your settings in the Load Balancer Gatekeeper cluster. If this does not resolve a hanging setup status, you should reach out to Webdock support for further troubleshooting.
