Described herein are systems and methods for use with a load balancer or traffic director, and administration thereof. In accordance with an embodiment, the system comprises a traffic director having one or more traffic director instances, which is configured to receive and communicate requests from clients to origin servers. A pool of origin servers is configured so that at least one or more of the servers within the pool are assigned as primary servers, and at least one or more others of the servers within the pool are assigned as backup servers. The traffic director is configured so that it determines the availability of primary servers in the pool, and directs requests only to the primary servers while the pool includes a sufficient number of available primary servers.