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

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.

mendozal

I went looking for info on the OpenLiteSpeed website. And I noticed that the latest version of the web sever is 1.7.16 which was released on may 2022.

Is this really the case? Or am I missing something? I’d believe that a web sever should receive regular security patches, at least.

Does anybody have more info?

JohnB

mendozal I would point out that the nginx releases don't seem super recent either http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES

Personally I'll take a webserver that doesn't need constant updates as they race to fix security bugs. Its possible litespeed just doesn't care or it could be that there arent many security issues found like nginx.

In my testing of runcloud, ploi, cleavr, raw implementation of nginx and openlitespeed, enhance... raw (none of these control panels) OLS wins every time for the homepage of a wordpress website. However when it comes to stress testing uncachable paches, nginx pulls ahead a little.