Due to the emergence of grid computing over the Internet, there is a need for a hybrid load balancing algorithm which takes into account the various characteristics of the grid computing environment. Hence, this research proposes a fault tolerant hybrid load balancing strategy namely AlgHybrid_LB, which takes into account grid architecture, computer heterogeneity, communication delay, network bandwidth, resource availability, resource unpredictability and job characteristics. AlgHybrid_LB juxtaposes the strong points of neighbor-based and cluster based load balancing algorithms. Our main objective is to arrive at job assignments that could achieve minimum response time and optimal computing node utilization. Major achievements include low complexity of proposed approach and drastic reduction of number of additional communications induced due to load balancing. A simulation of the proposed approach using Grid Simulation Toolkit (GridSim) is conducted. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs very well in a large grid environment.