Why host HAProxy on a VPS?
HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is an open source load balancing and TCP/HTTP proxy software recognized for its performance and reliability in production. Hosting it on a dedicated VPS lets you centralize traffic distribution among your application servers, ensure service continuity in the event of a node failure, and finely manage routing rules without license fees. It is the preferred solution of technical teams that want a robust, controlled infrastructure at a managed cost.
What you can do with HAProxy
- Distribute HTTP/HTTPS traffic among several application servers with configurable algorithms (round-robin, least connections, source IP…)
- Set up a reverse proxy to expose several internal services behind a single public IP address
- Monitor the health of your backends with automatic health checks and remove a failing server without service interruption
- Terminate SSL/TLS connections at the front end to offload encryption from your application servers
- Limit throughput and protect your applications against traffic spikes thanks to ACLs and rate limiting rules
- Consult real-time traffic statistics via HAProxy's built-in web interface (port 8404 by default)
Install HAProxy on your ServOrbit VPS
Order a ServOrbit Cloud VPS
Go to the /vps-cloud page and choose the plan suited to your estimated load. For standard HAProxy usage (proxy and load balancer for 2 to 5 backends), a VPS with 2 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM is a good starting point. Finalize the order: your VPS is provisioned in under 60 seconds.
Access the Marketplace in your client area
Log in to your ServOrbit client area, then open the "Marketplace" section from your VPS dashboard. The Marketplace lists all the applications available for 1-click installation, classified by category.
Select HAProxy and start the installation
Search for "HAProxy" in the Marketplace, click the application card, then "Install". The system automatically deploys HAProxy on your VPS via the ServOrbit provisioning system — no SSH connection or manual configuration required at this step.
Check the installation and access the statistics interface
Once the installation is complete, HAProxy listens by default on port 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS) for the proxy, and exposes its statistics interface on port 8404 at the URL http://votre-ip:8404/stats. This read-only page displays the status of your frontends, backends and servers in real time. No credentials are required by default, but it is strongly recommended to configure one (see the haproxy.cfg section, stats auth directive).
Configure your backends in haproxy.cfg
The main configuration file is located at /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg. Edit the backend section to declare the IP address and port of each application server to balance, for example: "server app1 192.168.1.10:3000 check" and "server app2 192.168.1.11:3000 check". Reload the configuration without service interruption with the command: sudo systemctl reload haproxy.
Pro tip: enable HAProxy health checks with the "check" keyword on each server line, and combine them with the "inter 2s fall 3 rise 2" option so that a backend is removed from the pool after 3 consecutive failures and reinstated only after 2 successes. This ensures a transparent automatic failover for your users in the event of an application server failure, without any manual intervention.
The official documentation
For advanced configuration, tool-specific options and version changes, refer to the official HAProxy documentation. This guide covers going live on a ServOrbit VPS; the vendor documentation remains the reference for fine-tuning.
