Speed up a website up to 20x or more with LiteSpeed

     The speed at which your website loads affects the user experience and your page ranking. If your site is slow to load, it also increases the possibility that the user will go elsewhere. This is an even bigger problem for users who view your site on a mobile device and may not have fast connection.

Fortunately, there are several ways to improve the speed of your website without too much effort or technical knowledge.

Choosing the right web host

     A market more than saturated. If you have started searching the web, you will have verified that the offer of hostings is overwhelming and the difference in prices between one and the other is surprising. This price difference covers many aspects: the hardware used, the storage capacity, the technical support they offer you, etc.

     CARDEI STUDIO was launched as a marketing agency specialised in custom website development and WordPress among other things, but in recent years the core business of our company has been reoriented towards web hosting services. For more than 20 years we have created web pages for clients and we have tested almost every provider on the market. We finally made a change of course that led us to become a hosting provider and today we offer complete hosting services around the world.

     When you are a web designer or programmer or you are starting in the web world, sooner or later you will have the need to look for a hosting, one of the most important points when choosing a good one is the performance of the servers. On the hardware side a the server must have a decent CPU, enough RAM and SSDs to ensure the high read and write speeds demanded by today's applications.

     No less important is the software that a server uses, it must be optimized to get the most out of that hardware, a very important piece is the type of web server that the hosting has, there are many options on the market and in CARDEI STUDIO we have almost all but above all the best.

Choose the right web server

     What is a server? Web servers are the foundation of web hosting, they allow customers to rent server storage to host their files.

An HTTP server, known as a web server, is software that installs, runs, and processes information from the server side. The web server is in charge of dispatching files through the HTTP and HTTPS protocols to a client that requests said information.

    On the internet there is already more than enough technical information about the main server software and the advantages and disadvantages among them, so we are not going to extend this article much with technical details.

     HTTP servers generally store web pages, which include HTML, PHP, etc. files, as well as images, videos, and audio. They are in charge of serving everything that is requested from a computer or mobile device when someone visits your website, we owe them the evolution of the web as we see it today.

      When we speak of a server we refer to hardware connected to a network. The hardware that it uses is precisely one of the characteristics of web servers in which it differs from home computers, since they have powerful CPUs, a lot of RAM, high-performance SSDs and Internet links of 1Gbps or more.

      As we can see, there are different web servers for different types of needs, now we are going to explore what are the most popular classes of web servers today at the software level.

Examples of Types of Web Servers

     APACHE - It is the reference web server for the Internet. Apache HTTP server was born in April 1996 and continues to this day. For the past 25 years it was the undisputed leader in web servers, until it began to lose popularity to Microsoft IIS and Nginx.

     NGINX - It is known as Nginx (pronounced in English as "engine ex"), it is a free and open source web server (although there is also a commercial version) that stands out for its high performance. It also includes features such as HTTP reverse proxy server, load balancer, as well as POP3 and IMAP. It is available for Windows, Linux, and Unix.

     LiteSpeed - The LiteSpeed server is an HTTP dispatch software developed by LiteSpeedTech, a company that has focused on developing one of the best alternatives to Apache for Linux environments.

What is the LiteSpeed Server?

     When one thinks of a web server, the first thing that comes to mind could be Apache mainly because it is the best known due to its history and its reputation generated in more than two decades, being the undisputed number one in the world of web servers. However, over the years some problems have appeared that necessitate more modern and efficient solutions because the Apache server can sometimes be a performance headache.

      One of the best substitutes that have emerged is LiteSpeed, a modern, robust and efficient server designed to support workloads much greater than Apache and even NGINX and over the years it has gained a well-deserved reputation based on quality. robustness, reliability and good performance.

Architecture

     The LiteSpeed architecture is based on events, this means that all the work is carried out by fewer processes than in other servers, instead of opening a new process or new thread for each request received, these are served by existing processes .

     This makes the response time faster because the process is already in memory instead of having to be loaded into it when receiving the request, in other words the time elapsed between the request is received and it is answered. it is much shorter compared to other architectures by avoiding the internal processing of lifting a new process.

      Among other things, a smaller number of processes avoids the duplication of memory between the different processes, when opening multiple processes many would load the same data and reserve a similar memory space, with LiteSpeed, since fewer processes are needed to attend all the requests, savings are achieved. of important memory and hardware required.

     The processing of pages in dynamics is much faster than in other servers since it incorporates LSAPI that is the acronym for LiteSpeed Server API that provides support for PHP, Ruby and Python that allows to process the code in a more secure, fast and efficient way.

     At the same time, it is one of the first servers to offer support for the QUIC protocol, which is or will be the successor to HTTP / 2, which is why it was later renamed HTTP / 3, a protocol based on UDP so recent that it is still in the phase of development. development and it is not an approved standard, it is still under review, that has not prevented companies such as Google from starting to use it, for example in Google Chrome.

Cache

    Another feature that differentiates LiteSpeed ​​from the rest of its competitors is that it incorporates its own caching system on the server and provides a plugin for the main CMS in order to get the most out of performance.

     Although the plugin is free and can be installed in any WordPress  installation, it only works when the server is effectively a LiteSpeed ​​web server.

     It can be compared with plugins like WP Fastest Cache or W3 Total Cache, however the advantage is that it interacts directly with LiteSpeed ​​Cache to improve performance, which other plugins cannot do.

     As mentioned LiteSpeed ​​offers a plugin for the main CMS on the market, among them is for WordPress, Joomla, Magento and Drupal that allow to improve the performance of the sites significantly reducing the loading time of the websites.

     It is a server that incorporates many of the good things of Apache, it is compatible with a good part of the configuration and some important modules of Apache that make it an ideal replacement.

     The fundamental difference is speed and efficiency, it has an architecture designed to take maximum advantage of CPU use and the number of cores of the same, that without neglecting memory use, both things imply on the one hand a lower workload for the server and being able to handle a greater traffic with the same hardware than what we could do with Apache.

Advantages

     One of the great advantages that make it the ideal replacement for Apache is its compatibility with Apache .htaccess files that ensure automatic migration from Apache to LiteSpeed ​​without the need for cumbersome adjustments.

     For example, to migrate from Apache to Nginx you have to completely rewrite the .htaccess files using the Nginx syntax, which implies time, trials and possible errors, along the same lines and no less important is that LiteSpeed ​​is compatible with mod_rewrite that allows you to friendly urls continue to be used as in Apache.

     This makes LiteSpeed ​​one of the main alternatives to Apache since it makes migration much easier than with other servers.

     It provides its own control panel that allows editing and configuring each aspect from a friendly graphical interface, without the need to resort to the console or configuration text files, a feature that does not exist in Apache or Nginx.

How to get a web hosting with LiteSpeed?

     At CARDEI STUDIO we offer you several hosting options based on the LiteSpeed web server.

      The first option is our Cloud Servers where you can add the CyberPanel + LiteSpeed Server Installation add-on. If in addition to fast web hosting you need an email solution, we recommend our LiteSpeed Combos packs. These packages combine: Cloud VPS + Daily Backups + CyberPanel + LiteSpeed + SSL + Email + 1 FREE Domain.

       For users who use WordPress as the center of their business, we have WordPress PRO packs that will allow you to feel the freedom to focus on creating that wonderful content or growing your business while we manage everything related to your WordPress.

      If you have any questions or do not know which option would suit you best, do not hesitate to contact our technical team, we will be happy to help you.