Are LiteSpeed Web Server and LSCache Worth the Additional Hosting Costs?

[mikey3times]

I am about to upgrade from a shared hosting account to a Managed VPS. My current shared account includes Litespeed Cache and I am running the plugin on a Wordpress install.

The new host I am looking at has LiteSpeed Web Server and LSCache as optional additional cost items. Do I need these additional monthly costs? I have a mix of Wordpress, Joomla, and static HTML sites.

It is a big jump from $10/month to $50/month. Do I need to add another $25? I can afford it...just making sure I'm not buying snake oil.

 

[mikey3times]

I'm surprised nobody here has an opinion. It seems evenly split across the internet. Half think you need LiteSpeed, half think new versions of Apache are capable if set up correctly.

From what I can gather, it makes sense to install LiteSpeed Web Server (LSWS) and LSCache if you are reselling (hosting hundreds of sites on your server) or if you are getting 1000 connections at a time.

It sounds like I don't need it for my few sites, which definitely don't get 1000 concurrent connections. I'll make sure to ask the host if it can be added easily.

I'm still interested in any thoughts from the server experts among us.

 

[Ryuzaki]

@mikey3times, I meant to reply and forgot after losing the "new" notification. I don't use either and have run up to 4000 live visitors at once and 250k pageviews over the course of the day. I use Apache + WP Super Cache and it's just fine.

If you go by this comparison (as told by LiteSpeed themselves), you'd think it was an ungodly difference. 4 and 5 times faster. They go as far as to say "LiteSpeed Web Server performs 12X faster than Nginx and 84X faster than Apache when loading WordPress."

I tend to be pretty skeptical about these kind of tests, even when they hire 3rd parties to run them. I think the improvements tend to be a lot less drastic when you're not talking about non-cached hits. Between caching and speed optimization, I'd say that closes the gap some since you aren't reading and writing to the database or compiling PHP nonstop. For eCommerce or SaaS apps it might make a huge difference. For cached ("static") content sites that are speed optimized, use lazy loading, etc...

I'd imagine it's true that LiteSpeed is newer and better. If it's 84x faster than Apache... I'm skeptical of that claim. But I'd guess it's legitimately better.

In my own cases, I'm happy to get more CPU and RAM going when I cap out and stick to Apache. But that's largely because I've not used LiteSpeed. I think when I'm slamming a dedicated server hard, I'd rather try out LiteSpeed + LSCache than to start sharding databases and loadbalancing resources, or offloading to a CDN again.

 

[bash]

NGINX+PHP-FPM tuned will perform close to what you are getting with litespeed and you don't have to worry about any stupid per CPU licensing BS

 

[BCN]

Nginx all the way here