Thinking of not going ahead with litespeed due to the license costs

Adrien

Hello Enhancers, I need your brain, please.

I lost confidence in my initial idea of hosting my clients on Bare Metal servers. In fact, I never really wanted to go BM but the licensing costs of Litespeed don't give much choice.

I see Nginx coming up this month on the roadmap. I'm very tempted to give up on Litespeed so I can host in the cloud instead and have multiple smaller instances.

According to my preliminary research, a good combination is NGINX and Varnish-based software stacks on the frontend and REDIS.IO or Memcached as a page or object cache in the backend.
Do you confirm that?

Are some of you guys already using Nginx on Enhance? Is the performance solid?

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experience.

DracoBlue

Why no OpenLiteSpeed? NGINX is efficient, but it needs to be configured properly.

Adrien

DracoBlue Not OLS because i

Unlike Litespeed Enterprise, OpenLiteSpeed needs to reload for changes to .htaccess files and must be restarted entirely when going through a server software upgrade.
I can't reload OLS every time a client modifies his .htaccess.

Redis should also only be used on Litespeed Enterprise and not OLS.

I'm also not considering OLS because of this: https://www.opensourceforu.com/2022/11/openlitespeed-web-server-seemingly-has-some-major-security-issues/

mendozal

Adrien apparently .htaccess change detection and automatic restart is being considered for the future

https://community.enhance.com/d/96-ols-reload-for-htaccess-changes

https://community.enhance.com/d/140-best-way-to-restart-ols

@Zoinkies does nginx have some .htaccess support?

Zoinkies

NGINX will equal the performance of Litespeed if properly configured.

Zoinkies

mendozal No, not on native NGINX. Use NGINX as a reverse proxy.

https://www.atatus.com/blog/how-to-set-up-a-reverse-proxy-in-nginx-and-apache/

mendozal

Zoinkies I see.
Then nginx + apache could perform similar than litespeed, provided is well configured. And you get all the benefits of apache (regarding the .htaccess situation, etc.), right?

Just to add a little, I’m currently using OLS because it’s semi support of .htaccess and mainly because it enables litespeed cache plugin on Wordpress. If not for that, I would’ve gone with Apache.

PradeepC

I would also prefer the setup of Nginx + Apache hybrid. As a ex-RC user, the setup works really great. The stack at RC was configured nicely and was fast.

kyzoeadmin

@PradeepC i agree that the RC setup works great i hope that Enhance will do the same. Although i also used Ploi and there it was native NginX and also nver had issues with permalinks, native nginx is slightly faster.

@Adrien i agree with you we still run litespeed Enterprise on four servers, we are in the progress of moving, I just optimised a site on enhance and it loads in 660ms according to GTmetrix, on the former hosting it runs in 7.2 seconds, so Apache is doing a great job also. And do we need to pay then the high licenses which come with ls enterprise licenses. I don't think so.

mendozal

kyzoeadmin was it a Wordpress site? did you use any caching solution other than LS cache?

kyzoeadmin

mendozal yes it is a WordPress site and we used WProcket for caching.

mendozal

Just to add a little to the mix.
I've done some tests using Enhance, no extra optimization on the webserver

Results
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m4s4XXcmLPc2bGqGY1pCi__JvHoMv8ot/view?usp=share_link

I used

OLS + LS Cache
OLS + WP Optimize
Apache + WP Optimize.

Maybe WP Rocket is better at caching (I didn't test it), but it has a price tag.
Maybe the NGINX proxy + Apache situation would work bettter than these scenarios.

John-P

mendozal Maybe WP Rocket is better at caching (I didn't test it), but it has a price tag.

Personally I'd recommend bothfree and paid versions of Swift Performance over WP Rocket any time for WP sites running on Apache servers.

Ned

mendozal

Not using LSCache defeats the whole idea behind using LiteSpeed, It’s what enables the server level caching.

Apache, LS, OLS and NGINX with something that caches to html will perform pretty equally, NGINX probably takes the cake if tuned for scale & it’s free.

With landing pages and more static WordPress sites breaking it down to HTML is easy, Things like WooCommerce and WordPress dynamic elements your server will see a real load and where performance should be measured.

PradeepC

See above, It wasn’t solid testing methodology

PradeepC

Thanks @mendozal for your test! It helps having a clear picture!

Ned

My suggestion would be OLS + LSCache until we hear more for NGINX, Chance it gets further delayed or we get a basic implementation or everything needed to use and tune for performance.

NGINX + FASTCGI cache is an ideal solution and hopefully available on launch, WP-Rocket has a great guide on how to setup dynamic content caching with it too.

Once nginx is live you will be able to remove lscsche (or keep it for the browser cache, minification etc) and nginx and fastcgi will handle the behind the scenes

Adrien

Ned What do you tell your clients? We are hosting you on OLS? or you just mention Litespeed and voila?

gavin

Adrien You tell them exactly what you use. There should be no confusion down the line.

Adrien

gavin I did not find any reputed WP hosting company offering OLS. Did you?

mendozal

Adrien I’m worried about this too.

I’m currently hosting clients in a Litespeed cPanel Reseller service and I’m slowly moving towards Enhance and my own infra.

But I’m not sure of what service to offer. I’m currently just offering OLS because is free but all the big names do Litespeed.