Bunny.net has introduced an origin load balancer for its content-delivery network, giving customers a way to spread requests across multiple backends and move traffic away from failures. The feature entered public preview on September 30 and is configured as a reusable routing policy that can serve one or several Pull Zones.
The service affects requests that must reach an origin. Responses already stored at Bunny CDN edge locations continue to be delivered from cache. For origin-bound traffic, operators can arrange servers in groups based on such factors as region, cloud provider, capacity or operational role. Those groups can then be placed in priority tiers, allowing primary infrastructure to carry normal traffic while reserve capacity waits behind it.
Within the preferred tier, customers can distribute requests evenly, assign weights, or favor backends according to proximity or measured latency. Bunny says a pool can mix conventional HTTP or HTTPS servers with its own Storage, Edge Scripting and Magic Containers products. That design lets a standby use a different type of infrastructure from the primary service rather than requiring identical backends.
For each request that misses the cache, the edge creates an ordered list of eligible destinations using the configured priorities and balancing rules. If the first attempt fails and another attempt is safe, the edge can proceed to the next candidate. Bunny says it avoids blindly replaying requests with bodies or methods that could create or change data after a server returns a 5xx error. The failover chain also has a time limit to prevent one request from cycling indefinitely through slow origins.
Health decisions combine optional checks conducted across Bunny's network with failures observed by an individual edge. An origin judged degraded by the broader monitoring system is removed from normal rotation until it passes again. A particular edge can also react to a problem visible only from its location. When no healthy destination remains, the system may try an unhealthy origin as a final option, but administratively disabled backends remain excluded.
The preview also supports sticky sessions through an encrypted edge cookie. That affinity yields to health: a visitor is moved when the selected origin becomes unavailable. Latency-based selection considers requests already in flight so that repeatedly choosing the fastest server does not overload it and erase its advantage.
Bunny priced the public preview at $9.50 per load balancer each month, including 50 million origin-bound requests. Additional origin requests cost $0.65 per million, while cache hits do not count. A policy shared across Pull Zones retains one allowance and monthly fee. The company is exposing distribution, performance and failover statistics through its dashboard and API.
