A lot of people are familiar with NGINX web server. Since LiteSpeed is built on a similar technology, you may be wondering what makes it different or better than NGINX and why you should choose LiteSpeed hosting over other types of servers?
What is NGINX?
NGINX is an open-source web server. It is now used as a reverse proxy, HTTP cache, and load balancer. It is commonly utilized in both the load balancing and HTTP caching layers.
Originally released in 2004, NGINX was created by Igor Sysoev. He designed it to be lightweight with a low memory footprint and high performance, especially under high loads. LiteSpeed Web Server shares many of these same characteristics.
What is LiteSpeed?
LiteSpeed Web Server is LiteSpeed Technologies’ web server. It comes in both an open source and commercial varieties. In 2007, LiteSpeed Web Server became LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise. It was configured to be an Apache drop-in replacement with integrations with popular control panels such as cPanel and Plesk.
LiteSpeed Web Server is open source and free to download under the GPL. LiteSpeed Technologies offers commercial support for LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise as well as LiteSpeed Cache, a content caching solution based on LiteSpeed Web Server and designed to accelerate both static and dynamic websites.
Simple Source Solutions uses the enterprise version of LiteSpeed on all of our servers.
What makes LiteSpeed so much better?
For starters, NGINX has two major drawbacks – memory usage and load times. The more requests made to your website, the more RAM will be used which can lead to significant slowdowns in performance. With this problem already inherent with just one request per user session, imagine how much worse things would get if there were multiple concurrent sessions for each visitor! To solve this issue many sites use cache plugins that help but never eliminate the problem altogether.
In contrast, LiteSpeed Web Server has the ability to handle more concurrent requests without any slowdowns in performance because it uses less memory resources.
LiteSpeed hosting is also faster than NGINX – with LiteSpeed you can reduce load times by up to 50%. With this decrease, your website will be able to provide better conversion rates and make a stronger first impression on new visitors.
Issues with NGINX compatibility
LiteSpeed also has a number of functional advantages over NGINX. For one thing, LiteSpeed remains compatible with all versions of PHP and MySQL as well as most popular CMSs including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and more. Additionally, LiteSpeed is more compatible with many web platforms such as Magento and Virtuemart.
One common way NGINX gets around compatibility issues is creative use of proxy. Under these scenarios, NGINX sits in front of a standard LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack and serves as a proxy to Apache. This adds a lot of unnecessary load just to be able to do common things like serve .htaccess rules.
In comparison, LiteSpeed is already installed on all our servers and there’s no need to install any additional software on top of PHP or Apache. Configuring LiteSpeed Web Server (LWS) is easier than configuring NGINX, especially for admins who are more accustom to working with Apache. And LiteSpeed can be used with more applications, technologies and platforms (e.g., Joomla, WordPress), so it’s more stable when upgrading web content management systems.
Control over caching
Another appealing feature is its proprietary cache plugin.
Training users to manage available caching solutions for NGINX (Varnish, etc.) is a huge hurdle to overcome. LiteSpeed cache plugin, on the other hand, is pre-configured with LiteSpeed Web Server to provide fast and reliable results. LiteSpeed’s 100% compatibility with LAMP stack means that LiteSpeed Cache Plugin will work without you having to learn an entirely new web server.
The bottom line on why LiteSpeed is better for hosting your site
These advantages make LiteSpeed a stronger choice than NGINX for any website regardless of its size or specific needs.
If you are looking for an affordable way to get content delivered quickly, securely, and efficiently then LiteSpeed Web Server enterprise is the best option available today.
if you’re interested in the best LiteSpeed hosting, you can get started today at getsimple.net for as little as $1.00.