The growth of the World Wide Web and web-based applications is creating demand for high performance web servers to offer better throughput and shorter user-perceived latency. This demand leads to widely used cluster-based web servers in the Internet infrastructure. Load balancing algorithms play an important role in boosting the performance of cluster web servers. Previous load balancing algorithms suffer a significant performance drop under dynamic and database-driven workloads. We propose an estimation-based load balancing algorithm with admission control for cluster-based web servers. Because it is difficult to accurately determine the load of web servers, we propose an approximate policy. The algorithm classifies requests based on their service times and tracks the number of outstanding requests from each class in each web server node to dynamically estimate each web server load state. The available capacity of each web server is then computed and used for the load balancing and admission control decisions. The implementation results confirm that the proposed scheme improves both the mean response time and the throughput of clusters compared to rival load balancing algorithms and prevents clusters being overloaded even when request rates are beyond the cluster capacity.