WebGate acts as an intelligent bridge between a cluster of Neptune Web Servers and your visitors. WebGate provides load-balancing between different web servers, to help increase site response time by intelligently routing requests and data through the least-busy servers.

WebGate can be used for complete website mirroring, providing multiple layers of redundancy for better fault-tolerance if a system or connection fails. By distributing your website over systems at separate locations and tying them together using WebGate, you can increase its responsiveness and availability.

When a website visitor types in the address of your website, WebGate routes various requests to the different web servers fastest to reply, then forwards the images and text to the website visitor. For example, images might be served from a different server to the main page, allowing the requests to be processed in parallel, and therefore much faster.

As far as a visitor is concerned, they browse your website as normal, but with the added advantages of increased speed and reliability.

At the heart of WebGate lies Silver Forge's powerful XPN library; a single fault-tolerant protocol for sharing data across networked applications such as web servers, distributed storage clusters, and general-purpose nodes. XPN is an extensible, open networking platform that allows you to easily add or remove components, and manage them from a remote location.

WebGate not only lets you choose individual web servers to load-balance between, but entire clusters, all of which are easily managed through its point-and-click interface. In the event that a web server in the cluster goes down, WebGate will dynamically allocate requests to another server with no interruption noticed by the user.

Administrators have the ability to "tunnel" into a server cluster from outside the gateway using Nexus Network Manager, servers can be remotely configured, without the need for on-site access.