If you’ve ever shopped around for web hosting, you’ve probably noticed various companies advertise what web server technology they use. The most frequently used web server is perhaps Apache, but there are alternatives such as Nginx and LiteSpeed, both of which are gaining rapid market share.
In this article, we will explore the background of these technologies, what their unique advantages and disadvantages are, and explain why we run (and love) LiteSpeed. This article isn’t meant to be a technical head to head comparison, although we do have some benchmarks for you at the end.
Let’s dive in!
Table of Contents
What is a Web Server?
Simply put, a web server is a software or hardware dedicated to running the necessary hardware that can satisfy client requests and deliver web pages to these clients. A web server can host one or many websites, depending on it’s own hardware configuration.
A client is any device that can access the internet, such as a smartphone, smartwatch, IP Camera, laptop, or desktop computer, and request data from a web server, typically by using a web browser, like Chrome or Firefox, for example.
Web servers have been around since the inception of the internet and the technology they use along with the content they serve has continued to evolve and shape the Internet we use today. The very first web server was a NeXT Computer workstation with Ethernet setup at CERN in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners Lee, who is credited with creating the foundation and basis of the protocols comprising the Internet.
Web servers also run on much smaller pieces of technology. You’ve probably logged into your home router by opening something like http://192.168.1.1 in your browser to make changes to your WiFi Network Name or Password. That is a web server and it’s running on your home router.
What Are The Top Web Server Technologies?
Apache HTTP Server
The most commonly used Web Server is by far Apache HTTP Server from the Software Apache Foundation. Created in 1995 by Rob McCool and Brian Behlendorf, among others. The name is a pun for A PatCHy server, as at the time of it’s inception, Apache was based on some existing code, along with some perhaps “hacky or clunky” software packages, enabling it to run. Additionally, the name Apache was chosen out of respect for the various Native American nations collectively calling themselves Apache, who were well known for their war strategy and inexhaustible endurance. According to W3Techs, Apache has around 36% market share as of September 1st, 2020.
Apache’s dominance is no mere coincidence. Much of the software’s foothold was achieved because Apache is preinstalled on all major Linux distributions. This makes it really easy to get up and running since as it’s already installed. Let’s also not forget, the primary protocol we use on the internet — HTTP — is synonymous with the name of the process under which Apache runs on Linux — HTTPD, aka the HTTP Daemon.
Nginx
Another increasingly popular web server is Nginx – pronounced as engine-x. Created by Igor Sysoev and released in 2004, Nginx was created with the explicit goal of out-performing the Apache Web Server technology, it currently has around 32.5% market share and is growing.
Out of the box and serving only static files, Nginx consumes much less memory than Apache and can theoretically handle four times as many requests per second. This is why it was initially used as a load balancer or reverse for busy websites. As the software evolved and the codebase grew, Nginx was able to fully replace Apache instead of just working alongside the webserver.
LiteSpeed Web Server
LiteSpeed Web Server, abbreviated as LSWS, is almost a newcomer to the webserver ‘scene’. It has gained a huge, perhaps even cult-like following in the last few years among web hosting companies due to its efficiency. With its streamlined architecture, companies running LiteSpeed Web Server could (theoretically) double the maximum capacity of websites their servers, assuming they were previously running Apache.
Imagine if you are a web hosting company and you have 20 servers in your fleet running Apache and each server could host 200 websites. That’s 4000 websites max you could host. Then you come across LiteSpeed Web Server which advertises the ability to double the capacity of your server fleet to 8000, just by installing the application? It’s a very tempting offer.
Internet Information Services from Microsoft
It would be remiss of me not to mention Microsoft’s own Internet Information Services or IIS. While there’s nothing overtly wrong with using IIS you won’t find many web hosting companies using it. First of all, IIS only runs on Microsoft Windows Server which has (often, expensive) licensing costs and many hosting companies just don’t want to spend the money. Second, IIS isn’t really great for PHP driven applications such as WordPress. While WordPress is theoretically able to run on IIS, it’s a painful setup that may involve actual witchcraft to get it running in the end as PHP is currently not working 100% with the latest versions of IIS and WordPress.
Microsoft’s IIS product is really designed for corporations still running applications or websites in its proprietary ASP.NET code on which a lot of business software runs. It’s in the corporate business world where you will find a lot of IIS servers running these applications, often legacy applications from decades gone by, or sophisticated Intranet portals for employees. IIS is often paired with Microsoft Sharepoint, it’s a collaborative software suite, or Microsoft Dynamics, it’s ERP application.
Why Choose One Over The Other?
The answer to this question isn’t an easy one. There isn’t a one size fits all solution to picking Nginx over Apache or LiteSpeed over Nginx. If you find yourself in the position of being able to choose one over another, you’ll really want to do your research and dive into how your users will be using the websites running on the server and what technology those websites are using, as that will help you come to a decision.
Apache is a great choice for Admins and Hosts who may want something that is very customizable as it has an extensive collection of precompiled modules that can be added. These modules range from anything such as authentication schemas to specific package support for PHP, TCL, Python, Ruby, etc…
Apache is also reliable, stable, and regarded as being beginner-friendly to users setting it up for the first time. Because Apache is in such wide use, it receives security and feature updates frequently and there is a large base for support out there.
Also, one important thing to remember – Apache runs applications that utilize CGI very well. While Nginx, for example, technically supports CGI scripts, setting it up isn’t easy.
One feature of Apache that many criticize is the use of .htaccess files to control things like rewrites and search engine indexing. When these files are enabled, Apache has to navigate the entire directory leading back to the parent directory and execute the commands listed in each of these .htaccess files. As you can imagine, this increases load time and consumes server resources.
Nginx on the other hand, can work as a reverse proxy in front of an Apache, or as it’s own web server and does not have an equivalent feature for .htaccess files. Apps written in Python and Ruby are known to have high performance when running on an Nginx web server. With load balancers, some optimization, and Nginx, you might have a setup that’s super high performance. Nginx also has a reputation for being difficult to set up compared to it’s contemporary Apache.
Comparing Nginx to Litespeed isn’t really fair or a great idea as while they are similar, they are both very specialized web server technologies. Nginx runs Ruby apps very well for example, while LiteSpeed has server-level caching + add on technologies like lscasche and lsphp which means apps like WordPress, MediaWiki, and Magento for example, run very well.
As a web host, the primary challenge we have isn’t things like blocking DDoS attacks and keeping our servers secure. That’s easy compared to keeping them from crashing due to too many concurrent visitors on one site eating up all the server resources, such as RAM and CPU. With Apache, that can happen real fast, especially with very busy websites, as each visitor to the site will cause the Apache server to open a new process chain on the server for that user for as long as they are on the website, whether they have requested these resources or not.
Sure, there are some modules you can enable in Apache for this, but using these can introduce other incompatibilities down the line or affect your ability to get a security update. Scary, right? Imagine your host not being able to update their servers because they have installed a very custom configuration that gives a small subset of their users higher performance, while the rest of their userbase doesn’t benefit from that configuration and as a result, they can’t update and your site is left exposed to a possible attack at the web server level. Not cool man!
This is but one of many other reasons why LiteSpeed Web Server has grown in popularity, especially amongst companies that offer web hosting. As LiteSpeed is a drop-in replacement for Apache, Admins won’t need to spend a lot of time on server maintenance. It also includes inherent protections from DDoS attacks by featuring bandwidth and connection throttling. LiteSpeed’s Web Server product is also the only one on the market to fully support HTTP/3, which increases the effectiveness of client-server interaction. This means when your user’s web browser requests resources from your website, such as images and video, as well as text, they are done so in streams rather than pieces, and content is served as needed, versus all at once whether it was requested or not.
It’s like being able to have your cake and eat it too. 🍰
Why Does ChemiCloud Run LiteSpeed?
We can offer our customers high performance hosting while not having to use complicated, fussy web server module configurations. In addition, as we run LiteSpeed Web Server, you’ll be able to install apps like LSCache on WordPress and leverage the server-level caching.
LiteSpeed Web Server is also a drop-in replacement for Apache and ships with cPanel. This means when we create a new server in a new location or for more capacity, the server won’t need custom configurations which could delay setup or introduce a possible security risk down the road.
Additionally, the vast majority of our customers run their websites on PHP applications, such as WordPress or Joomla, and one key component of the LiteSpeed Web Server is lsphp, a process that bridges the connection of PHP applications to the Web Server. LSPHP is incredibly efficient at what it does, especially compared to it’s equivalent on Apache.
In short, we utilize LiteSpeed Web Server to provide you with the best shared hosting experience possible.
Time For Some Benchmarks!
We chose to use the ApacheBench application as our command-line based benchmarking tool. The application is well established and documented and is reputed as being a reliable test. You could replicate these results at home with our servers if you wanted to. While ApacheBench was originally created to benchmark and test Apache Web Servers, the application is suitable for testing on any web server, like Nginx or LiteSpeed.
We also ran additional testing using GTMetrix, a well established online website performance testing service.
Our Test Environment
For testing, we wanted to be sure we tested using a configuration that was as equal and fair as possible. Each server was configured exactly the same, save for their web server technology. Below are their configurations:
We created 3 Cloud VPS Servers in Dallas. Below are their specifications:
| Apache VPS | LiteSpeed VPS | Nginx VPS |
|---|---|---|
| 4 GB RAM | 4 GB RAM | 4 GB RAM |
| 2 CPU Cores | 2 CPU Cores | 2 CPU Cores |
| Apache 2.4.46 (cPanel) | LiteSpeed/5.4.10 Enterprise | nginx/1.19.2 |
| cPanel / WHM | cPanel / WHM | cPanel / WHM |
| PHP 7.4.11 | 7.4.11 | 7.4.11 |
| PHP SAPI = fpm-fcgi enabled | PHP SAPI = litespeed | PHP SAPI = fpm-fcgi enabled |
| MariaDB 10.3.25 | MariaDB 10.3.25 | MariaDB 10.3.25 |
Our ApacheBench Configuration
The command we ran with ApacheBench was:
command ran: ab -n 2000 -c 100 URL
The above command set instructs Apache Bench to run 2000 requests with a maximum of 100 requests running concurrently.
Our ApacheBench Results
The results really speak for themselves. The images below represent the benchmark results on each of the 3 servers:
We have also included the full output from the ApacheBench tool below for your review, should you be interested:
======
Server Software: LiteSpeed
Server Hostname: litespeed.lcars.ch
Server Port: 443
SSL/TLS Protocol: TLSv1.2,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256,2048,128
Document Path: /
Document Length: 94906 bytes
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 2.606 seconds
Complete requests: 2000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 190328000 bytes
HTML transferred: 189812000 bytes
Requests per second: 767.57 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 130.280 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 15.303 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 71333.46 [Kbytes/sec] received
=======
Server Software: nginx
Server Hostname: nginx.lcars.ch
Server Port: 443
SSL/TLS Protocol: TLSv1.2,ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384,2048,256
Document Path: /
Document Length: 94502 bytes
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 65.696 seconds
Complete requests: 2000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 189398000 bytes
HTML transferred: 189004000 bytes
Requests per second: 350.44 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 3284.801 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 32.848 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 51435 [Kbytes/sec] received
====
Server Software: Apache
Server Hostname: apache.lcars.ch
Server Port: 443
SSL/TLS Protocol: TLSv1.2,ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384,2048,256
Document Path: /
Document Length: 94603 bytes
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 86.838 seconds
Complete requests: 2000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 189604000 bytes
HTML transferred: 189206000 bytes
Requests per second: 150.03 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 4341.890 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 43.419 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 42136.21 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 3 40 144.0 14 1308
Processing: 221 4212 537.9 4181 5807
Waiting: 209 4211 537.7 4179 5806
Total: 229 4253 529.3 4201 5927
GTMetrix Results
The GTMetrix reports revealed much the same as the numbers above. LiteSpeed Web Server wins by a significant advantage compared to Nginx and Apache.
You can click on any of the images to view the full test report.
Conclusion
When it comes to the success of your website, the speed with which pages load for your customers and users is very important. The results clearly speak for themselves – LiteSpeed Web Server has a clear and distinct performance advantage over it’s contemporaries and it’s, for this reason, we at ChemiCloud offer it to our customers by default on our Shared and WordPress Hosting.
Should you find yourself wanting literally a LiteSpeed fast website, you’ll want to check out our web hosting plans! Thanks for reading and if you have any questions or comments, leave them below or reach out to our support team! We’re here 24×7!
