A method and apparatus is provided in which a multi-site load balancing system directs a client to a site best able to respond to the client's request based on a combination of balancing methods. Performance metric balancing is employed to select sites having the best performance metrics to participate in network latency balancing to determine the site best able to respond the request. The sites participating in the network latency balancing are selected based on having performance metrics within an allowable deviation of the best performance metric. Alternatively, network latency balancing is employed to select sites having the least network latency to participate in performance metric balancing to determine the site best able to respond to the request.