In a network, a user can configure host-level policies usable for load balancing traffic to servers of a domain. A global server load balancing (GSLB) switch provides load balancing to the servers, and is configured with the GSLB host-level policies. Users can define a host-level policy (alternatively or additionally to a globally applied GSLB policy) and apply the host-level policy to hosts in domains configured on the GSLB switch. Thus, the user can enable different policies for different hosts. This allows the user to have the flexibility to control metrics used for selection of a best address for querying clients, as well as the metric order and additional parameters used in the GSLB process, at the host level.