Various embodiments provide a method and apparatus of providing a load balancing configuration that adapts to the overall load and scales the power consumption with the load to improve energy efficiency and scalability. The energy efficient distributed and elastic load balancing architecture includes a collection of multi-tiered servers organized as a tree structure. The handling of incoming service requests is distributed amongst a number of the servers. Each server in the virtual load distribution tree accepts handles incoming service requests based on its own load. Once a predetermined loading on the receiving server has been reached, the receiving server passes the incoming requests to one or more of its children servers.