Cloud technology is increasingly widespread as thriving businesses and research organizations seek to leverage its on-demand access, service models, and deployment patterns. However, further enhancements are still required to achieve optimal performance within this field. One challenging aspect is load balancing, specifically the equilibrium distribution of workload across virtual machines, which is a computationally complex problem. The present work extensively reviewed the state-of-the-art methods for load balancing in the cloud, encompassing traditional techniques, heuristics, meta-heuristics, and hybrid approaches. This paper provides a comprehensive historical assessment and comparative analysis of the prominent literature on load balancing, serving as a valuable resource for researchers aiming to develop new and effective load-balancing algorithms in the domain of fog-cloud networks. In this study, a thorough historical evaluation and comparative research of load-balancing literature can provide important insights into the development, efficacy, and adaptability of load-balancing strategies in a variety of scenarios. There are many fascinating directions that researchers in this area might go in, addressing both the past developments and the upcoming difficulties of load balancing in the dynamic environment of computing and networking.