Apache is a popular http server that allows users to host websites and when combined with PHP and mySQL in the environment, it allows hosting dynamic content. With being shipped as a default option with many hosting softwares such as cPanel, most users do no try to find an alternative and stick to the default software due to the support structure and automatic updates provided in a packaged Eco-system.
If you are here, someone may have advised you about switching to LiteSpeed Web Server due to the speed it offers and you reached Zycoon Media by searching about LiteSpeed. Lets dig straight into if and how LiteSpeed is better than Apache or does it offer any improved performance. While there are numerous benchmarks available on the internet about LiteSpeed, we would discard all those tests and only talk about our experience with the two web servers and how one proved to be a better choice than other.
From many years, litespeed has been a popular choice of many high end companies who receive a huge amount of traffic and need to be always online due to their business nature. While some 10 years back, website availability was not that critical and very few small businesses opted for load testing and website monitoring services, but with changing demand and shift to online selling and google updated algorithms that want the website to be fast and error free, it has become critical even for small businesses to have their website served reliably.
Now that we know why people started switching to LiteSpeed a few years back, lets get straight to the one vs the other. With our years of maintaining web servers and optimizing them for speed, we have seen that apache has improved a lot on the way. Not just apache alone, but a combination of other software’s together with apache perform solid and give a 1 to 1 performance comparison to LiteSpeed. We recently helped a client move from LiteSpeed to Apache based setup and that setup proved to be 3x better than ever. So what setup was it?
We setup cPanel on a dedicated server and combined it with Cloudlinux, and for some, it may sound weird that why cloudlinux for a single client on a single server, CloudLinux offers LSapi which offer huge performance boost and combined with connection pool enabled, it performs many times better than PHP-FPM or SuPHP. Note that we had all limits off on CloudLinux and had mySQL governor set to off. Other reason why we choose CloudLinux was that the clients software was using older version of PHP and CloudLinux patches any end-of-life PHP version for improved security.
The next setup was to optimize mysql to handle a bulk of connections and optimizing Apache for performance under high load. Also, we tweaked Opcache setting to allow access to huge amount of memory thus allows the website to run 10x faster and to be able to handle large amount to resources. On top of all this optimizations, we also enable object caching at the software end and also custom coded a page cache system for the website to serve static pages from cache if the user is not logged in. Apart from all these changes, we did look into almost a hundred of other items that could help with speed and security thus allowing website to run butter soft. Also, there are many inbuilt cpanel speed optimization options available with the software, which we configure based on individual website requirements.
If you got side tracked by Apache, we also love LiteSpeed, but with too much of cache, it has its own issues and sometimes causes more issue if the system it too big and the cache needs to much optimization for each area, which may not even be feasible in some situations. If you system does involve dynamic data that LiteSpeed is not respecting, or the cache rules do not allow low resource usage, we can always help you with the server optimization.
We will review your current server and provide our plan for how we can make it better and improve your website delivery. We believe in speed and if your website is not loading fast enough, let you improve it for you.
Contact our team for any inquiry on web server optimization.
