We facilitate communication.

The going and the telling

First we sailed out to see what was there. Then we laid a cable, so we could tell everyone what we found. Electricity, steam, flight, the telegraph, the telephone, the internet. It is tempting to treat those as separate inventions, but they were all the same one. Every one of them was a way to be somewhere we are not.

Exploring and connecting were never two different things. You go, and then you need to share it, and what you found is worth nothing to anyone back home until they hear it.

Now the machines are doing both. A great many of them, very fast, from everywhere at once. Somebody has to carry that.

Who we are

Balancer is built and operated by NetActuate.

For more than two decades NetActuate has run BGP and anycast at scale: the routing, the names, the certificates, the edge. The parts of the internet that other companies quietly depend on and never think about. Critical services, kept up by people who get called at three in the morning.

We are one of the most connected networks on earth by the number of networks we peer with directly. We do not own the internet, and neither does anyone else. We are just connected to a very large part of it, and we work a layer above the wires so that you do not have to think about any of this.

We are also much smaller than people assume when they see the map. That is deliberate. It is why we can still answer a question with an answer rather than a ticket number.

All of that has only ever been sold to network engineers, in the language of network engineers. You needed to know what an AS number was before you could buy anything. Balancer is that same network, handed to you. The open network edge, the anycast, the peering, the people at three in the morning. One API instead of a quote.

What we believe

We would rather hand you the keys. Not because we are a charity, but because a customer who can leave and does not is worth more than one who is stuck, and because we would rather compete on being good than on being difficult to escape.

Why it is called Balancer

Because that is the job. Traffic across paths. Load across origins. Speed against cost. Control against simplicity. Small companies against very large ones.

Balance is not something you find. It is something you hold.

Every second. Across every path. Let go for a moment and it all comes down.