Why does my load balancer respond with an HTTP 503 error?

DigitalOcean Load Balancers return an HTTP 503 error when there are either no target Droplets assigned to the load balancer, or all of the target Droplets are unhealthy.

If all of your target Droplets are correctly assigned to the load balancer, check the following things to see if there is a problem:

• Make sure your Cloud Firewall rules allow the target Droplet to accept traffic from the load balancer.
• Ensure that private networking is enabled on the Droplet and that the Droplet is in the same VPC network as the load balancer. If private networking is not enabled, you can enable it and migrate the Droplet into the target VPC network.
• Ensure the application on your target Droplets is running and listening on the VPC private IP.
• If you have enabled PROXY protocol on the load balancer, check that the application on the target Droplets is configured to expect PROXY protocol.
• Ensure your load balancer’s health check settings match your application.

You can review our Droplet Connectivity Troubleshooting Guide for more in-depth investigation and tips.

Related Topics

Why does my load balancer respond with a 504 Gateway Timeout error?

By default, load balancers time out after the connection has been idle for 60 seconds. You can customize the timeout duration.

How do I implement daily Droplet backups?

You cannot change the frequency of Droplet backups, but you can use Snapshooter or the API to create daily snapshots of your Droplets.