Introduction to LiteSpeed

LiteSpeed is an enterprise web server solution offered to accelerate web application performance. Traditional Apache server is ruling the market due to their open-source availability and community support. Still, LiteSpeed is the competitive web server available in the market, estimated to be used by approximately 10% of websites as per July 2021 data (Source: Wikipedia).

LiteSpeed web server also known as LSWS is highly compatible with industry-leading control panels including cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, Cyber Panel. The best part about it is that it is openly accepted by cloud giants including Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, etc.

We are honored to share the official strategic partnership with LiteSpeed Technologies. At KnownHost, we offer LiteSpeed licenses as addons; you can simply add it while placing a new order of Managed Services and Unmanaged Services or get in touch with our team for the after-sales purchase.

Why choose LiteSpeed?

For very high-traffic websites, LiteSpeed can be much more efficient than Apache. Adding it to a server can allow it to handle the site traffic more easily without adding more resources to the server. Since, depending on the size of the server, adding LiteSpeed can sometimes cost less than moving to a higher tier server plan (subject to analysis of requirements), it can be worth considering. Additionally, for sites with the highest traffic levels, even a large server might not keep up well enough if using Apache. In such situations, switching to LiteSpeed may be necessary to work well and serve its purpose. LiteSpeed can also decrease overconsumption of the physical resources (RAM, CPU, IO), keeping the server’s load under control.

Here are the official benchmarks published by LiteSpeed Technology on their official website (Higher the best),

Source: LiteSpeedtech.com

Source: LiteSpeedtech.com

Use Cases Of LiteSpeed

LiteSpeed is most useful for sites with very high traffic. Under these conditions, Apache (with typical configurations) would launch many processes to handle these requests. Each of these processes would take up some of the CPU time and some of the memory, so even if some of the limits are set higher to allow Apache to “attempt” to handle more requests, that could put other daemons in danger, such as MySQL, if there isn’t enough memory left for them.

LiteSpeed can also help somewhat in a server with many sites of low to medium traffic if there are enough sites that even this amount of traffic causes a high server load. However, it may be more effective to split the accounts among more servers in these cases.

Compatibility

It is important to note that LiteSpeed is not compatible with mod_ruid2. Due to how it changes the user, the web server processes run as, and is probably not compatible with mpm-itk (Not applicable to DirectAdmin) for the same reason. If you will be using LiteSpeed, it is recommended to set Apache’s PHP handler to SuPHP if using WHM/cPanel or lsphp for DirectAdmin. While the server is in Apache mode and running SuPHP, Opcode caching (such as Zend OPCache) would no longer work (and for this reason, all Opcode cachers should be removed while Apache and SuPHP are in use). However, LiteSpeed’s built-in PHP handler should still cache Opcode correctly if suEXEC is in ProcessGroup mode.

Licensing

LiteSpeed Technologies introduced the licensing based on the number of Domains, Worker processes and available RAM on the server. Also, LiteSpeed has some free addons (Example: Lite Mage) for higher plans.

For our Managed VPS and Managed KVM Cloud packages, the cost of the license depends on the amount of RAM the server has. For our Dedicated Server packages, the cost of the license depends on how many of the server’s CPUs you would like to be used for LiteSpeed at once. Please feel free to contact the Billing Department either by email or by opening a ticket with the Billing Department from the Support Portal for more information about licensing.

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cPanel Control Panel

For cPanel/WHM panel, we use their official WHM plugin to do so. With this plugin, cPanel Support will also officially support LiteSpeed, so if LiteSpeed itself or the plugin itself is broken in a way we cannot fix, we will be able to ask them for additional assistance (or to open a bug report if needed). For this reason, LiteSpeed is often a better option than Nginx, despite the price difference.

Some of the features of the LiteSpeed plugin for WHM can be accessed directly from WHM, at

Home → Plugins → LiteSpeed Web Server

DirectAdmin Control Panel

For DirectAdmin, the LiteSpeed WebAdmin Console can be accessed from “Extra Features” after it has been fully installed. Some of the features can only be accessed from within LiteSpeed’s admin area. This can be found at URL http://:7080/) This page requires a separate login from DirectAdmin or WHM. By default, the LiteSpeed admin area will have username admin, and the password would have been provided at the time of LiteSpeed’s installation. Don’t know your LiteSpeed’s admin password? See below!

Resetting Password

If you need to change the password for the LiteSpeed admin area, this can be done by logging into SSH as the rootuser , and then running the following command:

/usr/local/lsws/admin/misc/admpass.sh

This will prompt you for a new password. Make sure to choose a strong one!

Conclusion

Now that we’ve gone over what is LiteSpeed is and how to work with its compatible control panels i.e., cPanel/WHM and DirectAdmin.

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