There are two primary ways to configure Squid to be a load balancer. The easiest is to simply list multiple ips for the %httpd_accel_host% in your %/etc/hosts% file and Squid will automatically round-robin across the backend servers. This is more complex. Squid has advanced support for communicating with other caches. It just so happens that this communication happens over HTTP so you can set Squid up to treat the web servers you wish to load balance as peer caches. The configuration would look something like this: %no-query% in the above tells Squid not to try to send ICP (Internet Cache Protocol) requests to the Apache servers. You could turn on the %echo% port on each server and redirect these ICP requests to there which would make this system automatically detect a server that is down. It is generally a good idea to avoid external redirectors. A lot of things can be done directly in Squid's config file. For example: This would configure Squid to send requests for pages on certain domains to certain backend servers. These backend servers could actually be aliases to different ips on the same server if you wanted to run multiple Apache instances on different ports on the same box.