A method for an appliance to switch handling of transport layer connection requests from a first virtual server of the appliance managing a first plurality of services to a second virtual server of the appliance managing a second plurality of services upon exceeding, by the first virtual server, a maximum connection threshold determined dynamically from a status of the first plurality of services The appliance establishes a predetermined threshold identifying a maximum active transport layer connection capacity for the first virtual server that comprising a sum of a predetermined connection capacity for each of the plurality of services. The appliance determines via monitoring that the status of a service of the plurality of services indicates the service is not available and adjusts the predetermined threshold to comprise the sum of the predetermined connection capacity for each of the plurality of services having a status of available.