What are the best free load balancing services for testing failover across sites?

If you want to test failover across sites without paying for a full HA/load-balancing setup, the best free or free-tier options are usually:

1) Cloudflare Load Balancing (not fully free, but very useful for testing)

• Pros: Excellent global DNS, health checks, geo/load policies, easy to test failover behavior.
• Cons: Typically paid; not a true free plan, but worth mentioning because it’s one of the best tools for this use case.
• Best for: Testing DNS-based failover and multi-site routing.

2) AWS Route 53

• Pros: Health checks + DNS failover, simple to configure, widely used.
• Cons: Not free beyond limited low-cost usage; health checks and hosted zones are paid.
• Best for: Testing site-to-site failover via DNS in a realistic cloud environment.

3) Azure Traffic Manager

• Pros: DNS-based global traffic routing with health probes.
• Cons: No permanent free tier for serious use.
• Best for: Multi-region/site failover tests.

4) Google Cloud Load Balancing

• Pros: Strong global load balancing capabilities.
• Cons: Generally not free for real testing.
• Best for: Cloud-native failover testing.

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Actually free options / closest to free

5) Your own DNS + health-check script

• Use:
  • a cheap/free DNS provider
  • a small script or cron job to update records based on health
• Pros: Fully under your control, can be free if you already have DNS hosting.
• Cons: You must build the failover logic yourself.
• Best for: Lab testing and learning.

6) nginx / HAProxy / Keepalived in a test lab

• Not a hosted service, but you can simulate load balancing/failover for free on VMs.
• Pros: No service cost, great for realistic testing.
• Cons: You manage everything.
• Best for: Testing application and network failover in a controlled environment.

7) Cloudflare DNS only

• Cloudflare’s free DNS plan is free, but health-checked failover/load balancing is not.
• You can still use it for:
  • basic DNS
  • manual record swapping
  • proxying
• Best for: Simple DNS-based experiments.

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Best choice by scenario

• Want true automated failover across sites:
  AWS Route 53 or Cloudflare Load Balancing (usually paid, but best tools)

• Want free testing only:
  DIY DNS + health checks or self-hosted HAProxy/Nginx/Keepalived

• Want to test DNS failover behavior specifically:
  Route 53, Azure Traffic Manager, or Cloudflare DNS with manual switching

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Recommendation

If your goal is specifically free testing across sites, I’d suggest:

1. Self-host HAProxy or Nginx on two test sites/VMs
2. Use a free DNS provider
3. Automate health checks with a script
4. Optionally test with Route 53 if you want to evaluate real DNS failover behavior

If you want, I can also give you:

• a comparison table
• a step-by-step free failover test setup
• or recommendations based on your environment (AWS, on-prem, Kubernetes, etc.).