Litespeed web server vs Nginx ?

I am new to Litespeed web server, i want to know about this web Litespeed web server, how can it compare with Nginx? which is better and how to have Litespeed web server on my vps server?

You will find a lot of comparisons between nginx and LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed, mostly focusing on speed. The reality is that they are both very fast servers, and when they are properly configured you are not going to notice a big speed difference between them unless you have incredibly high rates of traffic. nginx fans will always manage to generate metrics that show how it is the fastest thing in the world, while LS fans will always say how many times faster that is.

One of the biggest differences is that LiteSpeed is a direct drop in replacement for Apache and uses .htaccess rules. The commercial version of LiteSpeed respects all rules, while Open LiteSpeed has a bit more limited support.

The other big difference and the key reason that we are using LiteSpeed on most of our servers is that it has very good server level caching, and plugins for WP, Magento, etc. that integrate with it brilliantly, and much more easily than equivalents on nginx.

S4 Hosting said:

One of the biggest differences is that LiteSpeed is a direct drop in replacement for Apache and uses .htaccess rules. The commercial version of LiteSpeed respects all rules, while Open LiteSpeed has a bit more limited support.

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as your recommendation then i should go with paid litespeed for better support .htaccess rules?

S4 Hosting said:

LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed, mostly focusing on speed.

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Which one will you suggest me to use?

It depends on how complex your htaccess rules are, if they are just basic rewrites then OLS will work just fine.

Also how many domains are you going to be hosting on the server and are they all administered by you or by other people as well? LSWS picks up htaccess changes automatically but with OLS you need to restart LiteSpeed each time you make changes, so that doesn't work well for multi-admin applications.

S4 Hosting said:

It depends on how complex your htaccess rules are, if they are just basic rewrites then OLS will work just fine.

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no, my websites used complex htacess rules.

S4 Hosting said:

Also how many domains are you going to be hosting on the server and are they all administered by you or by other people as well? LSWS picks up htaccess changes automatically but with OLS you need to restart LiteSpeed each time you make changes, so that doesn't work well for multi-admin applications.

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Just me on my server with about 10 websites, as my check, LSWS is a paid web server? can I used it for free on any paid control panels as cpanel, plesk or directadmin? According to your advice, LSWS is the best for loading website faster and solve htaccess rules better?

LSWS is paid but it sounds like OLS (which is free and still very fast) might still fit the bill, if you are the only person using the server and you don't have multiple admins making htaccess edits.

Alternatively I'd stick with nginx or Apache, personally I'm not a fan of the whole nginx as a proxy in front of Apache setup, just adds more layers of possible issues. But it sounds like you don't want to mess around with nginx redirect rules.

This weekend I replaced Apache in my control panel (Plesk) with LiteSpeed Ent. I am blown away and my clients are blown away.

I moved one of my clients from a Big Daddy to my new LiteSpeed setup. The client's WordPress site was all but disabled --- hardly load one page. Now, pages load instantaneously. Case closed -- I will never go back. I will admit that I added a CDN, but that is just a piece of the puzzle.

Maxoq said:

I am new to Litespeed web server, i want to know about this web Litespeed web server, how can it compare with Nginx? which is better and how to have Litespeed web server on my vps server?

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LiteSpeed offers plugins for cPanel, Plesk, Direct Admin, Virtualmin, and Cyberpanel. I personally have a lot of trouble with CyberPanel crashing. Also, aaPanel offers Open Lightspeed.

You can try DirectAdmin which allows you to install OLS natively , then you can make tests, if you like it, go ahead and use in production.
IMHO, for Litepseed paid license, I don't like their pricing, I think their primary customers are big magento / ecommerce users where they want more bang for their bucks, for regular stuff, nginx is just fine.

S4 Hosting said:

The other big difference and the key reason that we are using LiteSpeed on most of our servers is that it has very good server level caching, and plugins for WP, Magento, etc. that integrate with it brilliantly, and much more easily than equivalents on nginx.

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sorry but 100% wrong.... Nginx has FastCGI cache server-level caching and many free plugins for clearing Nginx cache

digitalocean.com/community/questions/nginx-vs-litespeed-for-wordpress-performance

high-traffic WordPress sites will never use Litespeed, they always use Nginx because that is more stable and reliable performance (and security)

S4 Hosting said:

Alternatively I'd stick with nginx or Apache, personally I'm not a fan of the whole nginx as a proxy in front of Apache setup, just adds more layers of possible issues. But it sounds like you don't want to mess around with nginx redirect rules.

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why do Litespeed guys always say this? Nginx does not use .htaccess is a GOOD thing for security

wordpress.org/support/topic/litespeed-htaccess-getting-malware-constantly/

setup Nginx with free LEMP scripts like SlickStack or Webinoly is going to be stable performance than any Litespeed bloat


there is only 1 reasons why web host uses Litespeed, because they want to install cPanel and put 1000 customers on the same VPS server, so Litespeed made it easy to accomplish with their paid apps and support... standalone sites (cloud servers) should always use Nginx

anyway Varnish + Apache or Varnish + Nginx can make even faster (Varnish is same like LS Cache) but full of problems, why Nginx FastCGI is more reliable

The benchmark Litespeed don't want you to see: unixy.net/apache-vs-litespeed/

100% wrong... Nginx had FastCGI cache (server-level) already integrated, why Litespeed web hosts always lying about that?

LS Cache plugin for WordPress is bloated and caused many 403 503 errors for my sites when I used it before, deleting that plugin solved many problems

.htaccess is a security nightmare, malware infections all the time... none of that with Nginx

many free LEMP install scripts for Ubuntu + Nginx/WordPress, zero free scripts for optimizing OpenLitespeed... (also OLS is full of bugs)

only cPanel web host should consider Litespeed, normal user with few websites should use Nginx or Apache only

LiteSpeed beats Nginx in every test: it transfers files faster and uses less CPU and memory. At low bandwidth, nginx never achieves TCP-level throughput. Nginx's throughput is a fraction of LiteSpeed's at high bandwidth. The HTTP/3 implementation in Nginx is not yet ready for production use.

bcca said:

Nginx beats Litespeed easily with Varnish enabled if you only care about few milliseconds speed

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I don't agree with this, both are very fast and very capable servers. We have sites running on both and there is little real speed difference as I wrote in my first post in this thread:

"You will find a lot of comparisons between nginx and LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed, mostly focusing on speed. The reality is that they are both very fast servers, and when they are properly configured you are not going to notice a big speed difference between them unless you have incredibly high rates of traffic. nginx fans will always manage to generate metrics that show how it is the fastest thing in the world, while LS fans will always say how many times faster that is."

You really can very easily find benchmarks that make either massively faster than the other, the real world reality is that it isn't the case at all.

If we are going to seriously have a debate about performance and serving the highest number of connections fastest with the least resources, then we should probably all be using Lighttpd.

bcca said:

Nginx beats Litespeed BY FAR if you care about stability and no 503 403 errors that Litespeed had on every single WordPress website (no thanks)

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I'm curious about this, and what specific setup and config you are using to have so many 503 and 403 errors, just because we host hundreds of sites on LSWS and OLS and never encounter these errors.

bcca said:

HTTP/3 is not a real web standard yet, even HTTP/2 is not approved yet... nice try

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That's true, HTTP/3 is still a proposal and in development, but all of the major browsers except for Safari already support it (see https://caniuse.com/http3). LiteSpeed supports it, Cloudflare uses it, and both nginx and Caddy have experimental support as well.

The HTTP/2 standard was agreed back in 2015 and let's be honest anyone not using HTTP/2 is seriously compromising performance.

bcca said:

.htaccess is a security nightmare, malware infections all the time... none of that with Nginx

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That may or may not be true, but it's hard to deny that .htaccess compatibly is a big plus for LS in a lot of poeple's opinion for various reasons. Again if we are going to debate which server has the easiest to understand and write config files then it's probably Caddy, but people are used to .htaccess and like the easy per site control it offers.

bcca said:

sorry but 100% wrong.... Nginx has FastCGI cache server-level caching and many free plugins for clearing Nginx cache

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It does, but in my opinion (and it is just an opinion, as is yours) the LSCache plugin for WP is the best option for WP caching, simplest to install and use, works very well, is faster in my testing, and is less bloated than many other caching options for WP, it also offers ESI and makes setting up crawlers easy (although the crawlers are not the best for warming the cache of small sites).

bcca said:

high-traffic WordPress sites will never use Litespeed, they always use Nginx because that is more stable and reliable performance (and security)

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That's clearly not true, you will find WP sites with huge amounts of traffic running on nginx, on LSWS, and still plenty that are running on Apache.

The bottom line, which was also kind of my first line, is that nginx and LSWS/OLS are both fast and both stable, and anyone who pulls out a benchmark that makes one hundreds of times faster than the other is probably biased in some way.

LiteSpeed
LiteSpeed is the most recent web server to gain popularity. Although the technique was released in 2003, it was not extensively adopted until 2010. As a result, LiteSpeed now has a market share of roughly 0% and is increasing.

Yong Wang, a Chinese engineer, designed LiteSpeed. His goal was to design a web server that could outperform Apache and even Microsoft IIS, which he believed he could do by utilizing threads (his engineering background). Even though he has not yet achieved his goal, LiteSpeed is still frequently used. The LiteSpeed Web Server's architecture is intended to improve efficiency. It also improves the performance and capacity of the server.

If you manage a web hosting company with 20 servers, each has Apache installed and operational. Around 200 websites can be hosted on each server. Unfortunately, you can only host 4000 websites at a time. Then there's Litespeed, which claims that by simply installing the application, the server's capacity will nearly treble to 8000.

Nginx
Nginx — pronounced engine-x – is another famous web server. It was created by Igor Sysoev and released in 2004, built Nginx to outperform the Apache Web Server. Nginx is currently used by roughly 32.5 percent of the market and is increasing.

NGINX uses threads and event-driven asynchronous I/O. It enables the latter to deal with tens of thousands of queries.

The fastest-growing webserver was Nginx. It can serve static files out of the box, whereas must configure apache for this. In addition, Nginx is more memory efficient due to its ability to handle many more requests per second, especially when providing dynamic content.
Nginx — pronounced engine-x – is another famous web server. It was created by Igor Sysoev and released in 2004, built Nginx to outperform the Apache Web Server. Nginx is currently used by roughly 32.5 percent of the market and is increasing.

NGINX uses threads and event-driven asynchronous I/O. It enables the latter to deal with tens of thousands of queries.

The fastest-growing webserver was Nginx. It can serve static files out of the box, whereas must configure apache for this. In addition, Nginx is more memory efficient due to its ability to handle many more requests per second, especially when providing dynamic content.

S4 Hosting said:

If we are going to seriously have a debate about performance and serving the highest number of connections fastest with the least resources, then we should probably all be using Lighttpd.

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Again this is the favorite distortion from Litespeed web hosts and partners... who is talking about # of connections or least resources? The propaganda released from Litespeed is claiming to be faster and that is nothing about scaling your shared server, or how many cPanel accounts you can smash together. Faster means how fast your website loads like TTFB metric and loading speed, and yes, Nginx (or Apache) is faster than Litespeed with Varnish added (LS Cache is copycat of Varnish)... almost every web server can be the same speed like you mentioned if configured correctly, but that's different from Litespeed claiming higher load for shared servers

If you had 5 million page loads every second like their benchmarks, you will already have load balancing, CDN, and many things... so it's pointless propaganda because they should claim only "Litespeed can handle 5 million loads per second better than Apache" then okay, I will accept it

But for me "reliable" and "super fast" (Nginx FastCGI cache) is better than "fastest" using those HTTP output cache like Varnish/LS because I am using high traffic WordPress sites and never using control panels or shared servers... stability is critical

If anyone wanted truly fastest it will be static HTML websites and cache them on CDN edges... but that is useless, and also why output cache is overrated too

S4 Hosting said:

I'm curious about this, and what specific setup and config you are using to have so many 503 and 403 errors, just because we host hundreds of sites on LSWS and OLS and never encounter these errors.

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It's very common, search Google: "Litespeed WordPress 403 error" and "Litespeed WordPress 503 error" you can find hundreds of results

Nginx FastCGI cache never generated these errors because that is server-level cache, not HTTP cache like LS Cache (and no bloated WP plugin like LS Cache)... by the way Varnish also caused so many problems and conflicts too, sometimes "reliable" can better than only "faster"

S4 Hosting said:

That may or may not be true, but it's hard to deny that .htaccess compatibly is a big plus for LS in a lot of poeple's opinion for various reasons. Again if we are going to debate which server has the easiest to understand and write config files then it's probably Caddy, but people are used to .htaccess and like the easy per site control it offers.

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Again, are we talking about stability and high-traffic security? (yes I am) then .htaccess is a joke to consider including that... when you say "but people like it" I think you really mean that shared cPanel hosting companies like it because they can put 100 customers on the server using .htacess and vhosts

seriously no high-traffic company is going to use .htaccess because of all the security risks (also less stable because must be parsed every time)

S4 Hosting said:

It does, but in my opinion (and it is just an opinion, as is yours) the LSCache plugin for WP is the best option for WP caching, simplest to install and use, works very well, is faster in my testing, and is less bloated than many other caching options for WP, it also offers ESI and makes setting up crawlers easy (although the crawlers are not the best for warming the cache of small sites).

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honestly this is your inaccurate statement because LS Cache is one of the heaviest most bloated WordPress plugins ever created in the cache category... they had like 50 different features and tons of javascript loading... massive codebase, most of the features are not related to Litespeed server either

they made that plugin to impress newbie WordPress users on cPanel hosting, nothing else

again... high traffic sites will never use that bloated junk, they will use server-level cache like Nginx FastCGI and zero cache plugins in WordPress... or if they will configure Nginx server block to read cache files from a very lightweight cache plugin like WP Super Cache or something that is minimal code

LS Cache is definitely not simple to configure and use, that is why so many Google results "LS cache 403 503 error"

the ESI feature is one of the foolish features ever made for WordPress cache plugins, how can the average WordPress site even begin to configure that correctly? that is made for bloated sites that tried to hide some bad performance... but you need some genius to configure properly, and genius sites will not use bloated code anyway and probably not using Litespeed anyway too so really I don't know what the point of that... Varnish had that 15 years ago already but nobody really uses it for WordPress

S4 Hosting said:

That's clearly not true, you will find WP sites with huge amounts of traffic running on nginx, on LSWS, and still plenty that are running on Apache.

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please find any sites from Alexa Top 100 using Litespeed server? I never saw any... only Nginx seriously

I feel like this is going to rapidly devolve into something where I point out things to support my belief that both nginx and LiteSpeed are fast, stable and reliable (which in my experience with both they are), and you are going to completely dismiss whatever I say and just exclaim how nginx is better than anything else.

That's fine, but I don't really appreciate being told I am 'wrong', we have different opinions but that's all they are. Virtually everything you are writing is an opinion not any kind of fact.

With that said, I do just want to answer a couple of your points.

bcca said:

It's very common, search Google: "Litespeed WordPress 403 error" and "Litespeed WordPress 503 error" you can find hundreds of results

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Yes, true. I just searched for 'LiteSpeed WordPress 403 error' and got 36,300 results. I also searched for 'nginx WordPress 403 errror' and got 453,000 results. I didn't search for Apache, but I'm sure there are plenty of those as well.

For a lot of people nginx config is a lot more complex simply because they are used to using Apache and so anything following the same familiar config system is good for them.

bcca said:

Again, are we talking about stability and high-traffic security? (yes I am) then .htaccess is a joke to consider including that... when you say "but people like it" I think you really mean that shared cPanel hosting companies like it because they can put 100 customers on the server using .htacess and vhosts

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No, that's not what I mean, see my point above. It's also not necessarily unstable or a huge security risk depending on how everything is set up.

bcca said:

honestly this is your inaccurate statement because LS Cache is one of the heaviest most bloated WordPress plugins ever created in the cache category... they had like 50 different features and tons of javascript loading... massive codebase, most of the features are not related to Litespeed server either

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I'm not going to enter into a big debate about what the best caching to use for a WP site is, but I disagree with you. In our internal speed tests with about 12 different WP caching plugins, all setup correctly, the LSCache plugin on an LSWS server and using Redis is always in the top 3 fastest.

bcca said:

the ESI feature is one of the foolish features ever made for WordPress cache plugins, how can the average WordPress site even begin to configure that correctly? that is made for bloated sites that tried to hide some bad performance... but you need some genius to configure properly

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ESI is incredibly useful and the config for it with the LSCache plugin is really simple it just involves adding a shortcode to areas of the site you want to exclude from the cache.

It has nothing at all to do with bloat or hiding bad performance, it allows you to set much longer cache times for all of the static content on the site, while ensuring that dynamic elements are never out of date.

bcca said:

please find any sites from Alexa Top 100 using Litespeed server? I never saw any... only Nginx seriously

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Putting aside the fact that Alexa metric is massively flawed and not a real representation of anything at all, I don't have the time or inclination to look at what servers each of their 'top' sites is using, but...

I would guess that a lot of the top 10 will be using GWS because they will be owned by Google, I'd also guess that quite a lot will report as CloudFlare Server and won't expose what actual server the site is hosted on. Of whatever number are left, probably about 45%-50% will be nginx, with the rest split between Apache, LiteSpeed (I'd guess probably just 2-3%) and other servers.

But the top 100 sites which have massive amounts of traffic are not representative of what most people are doing or need to do, they are sites which have huge dev teams and highly experienced sys admins, with little limit to resources. They need to optimise things in ways that the vast majority of sites don't and I guarantee that whatever server they are running on, it's not a quick 'out of the box' install but a highly optimised one to fit their own needs.

At the risk of sounding repetitive and boring, both of the servers under discussion here are very good, for some of the same and some different reasons. To trash either one of them and declare that the other is so much better is simply not true.

S4 Hosting said:

Yes, true. I just searched for 'LiteSpeed WordPress 403 error' and got 36,300 results. I also searched for 'nginx WordPress 403 errror' and got 453,000 results. I didn't search for Apache, but I'm sure there are plenty of those as well.

For a lot of people nginx config is a lot more complex simply because they are used to using Apache and so anything following the same familiar config system is good for them.

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• "nginx wordpress" "503 error" = 20k results... but Nginx is #1 server in the world
• "litespeed wordpress" "503 error" = 5k results... mostly caused by their LS cache plugin for WordPress, for a server with only small market share?

The chance of getting errors and conflict with LS cache plugin is very high ... Nginx has no required plugins for WordPress, the difference is any errors on Nginx server is caused by misconfiguration but those errors on Litespeed are caused even from correct configuration. You are smart so I think you can know the difference.

S4 Hosting said:

It's also not necessarily unstable or a huge security risk depending on how everything is set up.

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.htaccess is ALWAYS a security risk and malware target... "but you can make it safe if you're a talented programmer" does not help newbies. Remember, you said Apache/Litespeed is better for newbies and maybe that is true, but it is also high chance of malware attacks.

S4 Hosting said:

I'm not going to enter into a big debate about what the best caching to use for a WP site is, but I disagree with you. In our internal speed tests with about 12 different WP caching plugins, all setup correctly, the LSCache plugin on an LSWS server and using Redis is always in the top 3 fastest.

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But you already said LS cache is "simple to install" and "less bloated" which are just totally inaccurate. How can the cache plugin with heaviest codebase in the total directory of WordPress.org cache plugins be less boated? Impossible... actually that is the most bloated cache plugin in the directory.

Also many comments on WordPress.org from users site got SLOWER after install that plugin, maybe from conflicts I don't know... but lots of weird reviews.

If this is fastest you can do for Litespeed, please contact me I can help you free to setup Nginx server:

S4 Hosting said:

ESI is incredibly useful and the config for it with the LSCache plugin is really simple it just involves adding a shortcode to areas of the site you want to exclude from the cache.

It has nothing at all to do with bloat or hiding bad performance, it allows you to set much longer cache times for all of the static content on the site, while ensuring that dynamic elements are never out of date.

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Again you cannot argue that Litespeed and LS cache are the easiest option for users but also talking about ESI that is only genius guys can configure. Most of my clients cannot even understand how to setup their contact form, so I think ESI is a joke feature for most users.

S4 Hosting said:

But the top 100 sites which have massive amounts of traffic are not representative of what most people are doing or need to do,

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Exactly the opposite, the most popular sites are directly evidence of what most internet users are doing, and 99% are using Nginx servers because Litespeed is so bloated and too unreliable for most application and who wants to pay for proprietary web servers? only small web hosting companies using cPanel / PHP sites.

I think Litespeed has a good business, like "premium" version of Apache with support for web hosts.

But... the false information about Litespeed being faster than Nginx, or easy to setup their LS Cache plugin is what bothers me.... I will let others contribute now, thanks

Litespeed is never faster than Nginx for loading speed or TTFB. Litespeed forces users to install a Wordpress plugin for caching, but Nginx uses FastCGI Cache at the server-level instead (no PHP processing).

LiteSpeed has a better TTFB when compared to Nginx, and Litespeed can handle very high concurrent users when compared to Nginx. LiteSpeed also uses fewer server resources compared to the Nginx stack, which reduced server costs.

Hey there!
There is no easy answer to this question. If you're choosing between Nginx and Apache or LiteSpeed over Nginx, there isn't a one size fits all solution. It is important to do a lot of research into how your users will access your websites running on the server and what type of technology they utilize, so you can make an informed decision.