Patent ID: 7233981

Claim:
A method of balancing accesses to mirrored copies of a resource stored at a plurality of alternate content providers, the method performed by a first content provider storing the resource, in a network having encrypted traffic includes the steps of: storing an address of each of the plurality of alternate content providers that stores a mirrored copy of the resource; receiving data enabling secure communication with a client over an encrypted tunnel; receiving an encrypted request from the client for the resource; forwarding encapsulated encrypted redirect packets to each of the plurality of alternate content providers, the step of forwarding including the steps of building a redirect packet for each of the plurality of alternate content providers, encrypting the redirect packets using the data enabling secure communications with the client to provide an encrypted redirect packet for each of the plurality of alternate content providers and encapsulating the encrypted redirect packets with a header identifying the encrypted packet as a redirect packet, identifying the client and a specified time to forward the encrypted redirect packets to the client to enable the client to redirect communications to a content provider associated with a first received encapsulated encrypted redirect packet.