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  1. #26
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    We'd like to use Lightspeed but their terms and conditions of use are ridiculous. They can't ever be taken seriously until they remove the licensing restrictions.

    They'll get bought by a larger company one day who'll no longer enforce the no-pornography rule and usage will surely explode.
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  2. #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by Talence View Post
    This point has been brought up before. I understand where you're coming from, but it's still odd that their main selling point is that they're compatible with Apache. So basically, their business model depends on Apache's performance to continue sucking. After all, what they sell is little more than a faster Apache. Maybe there's more to it, but this just strikes me as not-entirely-logical.

    I'll explain my own scenario: I have a small cluster of 20 servers used almost entirely for one site. For me, the time investment in learning how to use and tweak lighttpd definitely paid off. It's all for free and it's open source. My licensing fees for 80 cores is $0, I can extend the source with any custom mods and I can host any legal content (not a big issue in this context as it's not adult). The point is, it's free in terms of speech & beer.

    So if we're talking about a time investment... you're going to have to invest time no matter which httpd you pick. My total httpd-specific time investment over the years can be counted in hours, not days. The savings, performance and control that I got in return have been well worth it.

    I guess your scenario is different if you have to deal with clients of your own who demand Apache-compatible configuration or don't have that many cores, but still...
    I was using the fully swappable aspect of Litespeed to merely discount the people naysaying Litespeed comparing it to tweaking Lighttpd / NGINX - a custom solution will usually outweigh an out-of-box solution.

    Litespeed has numerous perks and features that has proven (to us) to outweigh every web server (and pretty little frontend / core dumps / graceful restart on crash / design decisions) which also tend to make it a favorite in my book, especially for sites that need HA in a shared environment. The fact that you can have a no hassle switch from Apache to Litespeed is simply icing on the cake - and yes it is a huge selling factor. Does that mean we would consider Litespeed or NGINX could do the same we'd utilize them? No! We would have to re-evaluate everything accordingly, though with my experience with the more popular web servers (with exception of ZEUS) Litespeed fits us perfectly.

    Also you're comparing apples to oranges - I also am a sysadmin on a large traffic media website which utilizes clustered servers as well. We utilize Lighttpd and Apache heavily, one for serving media and one for actual application processing. Beyond that we utilize a couple software load balancers (and previously utilized 2 hardware load balancers) to maintain HA. Also to ensure data consistency and redundancy we deploy numerous MogileFS clusters across numerous high capacity web servers to ensure there are always 2-3 copies of a single file available - think cheap scalable mans RAID. Beyond that logically separating the tasks of the servers to spread the load accordingly instead of having an "all-in-one" solution such as database servers, media servers, and so forth.

    What I'm trying to get at is as far as I'm concerned Litespeed is the most ideal solution for a provider in a shared environment. You're going to find ups and downs of any software given a certain situation - your points are valid but not in the context of my original post.
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  3. #28
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    Quote Originally Posted by CodyRo View Post
    We utilize Lighttpd and Apache heavily, one for serving media and one for actual application processing. Beyond that we utilize a couple software load balancers (and previously utilized 2 hardware load balancers) to maintain HA. Also to ensure data consistency and redundancy we deploy numerous MogileFS clusters...
    That looks like a pretty good and cost-efficient setup to me. I'd say a software load-balancer and MogileFS are decent choices. One question: why not use lighttpd for application processing as well? It uses fastcgi, which PHP and most other web-languages support. The speedup vs. Apache isn't as dramatic as when you deal with static content, but it's still a lot better.

    As for crashes... YMMV depending on which features you use, but lighttpd has been rock solid for us, without a single crash during the past few years.

    Quote Originally Posted by CodyRo View Post
    You're going to find ups and downs of any software given a certain situation - your points are valid but not in the context of my original post.
    Well, I did acknowledge (somewhat) that scenarios are different. It's good to include usage scenarios in the discussion.

    What annoys me, frankly, is that Apache, one of the flagship open source projects, still has poor performance even after all these years. Now other open source httpds have significantly better performance, but because Apache is the standard, any time a performance/etc comparison is made, it's to Apache.

    Still... good news for people in the business of making webservers. There is obviously a market out there in spite of free alternatives.
    There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't.

  4. #29
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    Quote Originally Posted by Talence View Post
    That looks like a pretty good and cost-efficient setup to me. I'd say a software load-balancer and MogileFS are decent choices. One question: why not use lighttpd for application processing as well? It uses fastcgi, which PHP and most other web-languages support. The speedup vs. Apache isn't as dramatic as when you deal with static content, but it's still a lot better.

    As for crashes... YMMV depending on which features you use, but lighttpd has been rock solid for us, without a single crash during the past few years.
    It is indeed cost efficient / decent setup - the point I was trying to make is it's such a drastically different environment than a shared provider. We don't utilize PHP but you're more than right - it's on my roadmap to migrate to Lighttpd. That being said the machines serving everything are beefy and behind a load balancer so things get queued up / won't cause a fork issue with Apache.

    As for the crashing - when you're in a shared environment I'd be shocked to not have a random crash occasionally by simply throwing every which variable at it.. you're really testing every facet and function of the webserver with so many people utilizing a single instance.

    Well, I did acknowledge (somewhat) that scenarios are different. It's good to include usage scenarios in the discussion.

    What annoys me, frankly, is that Apache, one of the flagship open source projects, still has poor performance even after all these years. Now other open source httpds have significantly better performance, but because Apache is the standard, any time a performance/etc comparison is made, it's to Apache.

    Still... good news for people in the business of making webservers. There is obviously a market out there in spite of free alternatives.
    No disagreement here
    Cody R.
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  5. #30
    Quote Originally Posted by BarackObama View Post
    I have to agree the prices are high when more cores are added.
    But what if one day there is a machine with 50 cores ? meaning we would be able to add say 50 times more customers than on a single server at a one time higher investment rate and litespeed would be getting only the monthly license fee of a single server.
    Therefore, i feel litespeed should rework their math equation and should introduce a reasonable price hike instead of going for a linear price rise when more cores are introduced.
    This is something nobody is going to avoid. Servers get faster, but prices with them get higher as well. I don't think a 50 core server in the future will be the same price or consume the same power. It will for sure costs allot more money not to mention how much you lose with server depreciation. Also, customers Pc and bandwidth get also faster as well, so you will not be able to host as much as you do know, just like 10 years ago clients consumed allot less resources on a server then they do today with video, web 2.0, etc. Servers get faster, but clients want more as well.

    If that is the case, they would just raise the prices based on the normal server use. How many clients have xxx servers, and based on that number, they price their software. When software developers start to calculate your big, his small, you pay more, he pays less, its messy, the software costs the same, no matter on what you run it, its the customer that runs it, its like they are providing the hardware. Look at cPanel for example, one price per server. Then look at Parallels where they want a share % of your profits. Which one do you think is a better investment as a company? I think the answer is clear.

    Quote Originally Posted by plumsauce View Post
    Is it really unfair?

    They are really charging for how much *use* you get out of the software. Counting cores is just easier than counting pages.

    Another way of looking at it is that the smaller machine is getting a break not that the larger machine is being ripped.

    Have you priced out Zeus lately?

    How about Cisco IOS. It's the same OS, but the more powerful the router, the more it's all going to cost you.

    Of course in the end you can always win the argument by not buying. It's your choice.

    But if you don't buy, you may not be able to put as many customers on that box. That means less money.

    So really, they are charging for helping you to make more money on the same box.

    But again, you can put less customers on the box, use free software, and make less money. But, you'll be happy to win the argument over pricing.

    BTW, by your standards, all hosting customers should pay the same price no matter how much of your box they use. Sounds fair, no?
    Hosting customers? No. Clients that buy their software, probably.

    Take an example, there are people that buy a Porsche, and they pay the same fuel as everyone else, regardless of their car price or how long they drive it, or how much miles they travel with it. They already pay allot more in car parts not to mention a big tax on the car.

    Its as if colo DC starts to charge you not per cabinet, power and bandwidth, but instead based on the servers you have, if you have more powerfully machines then you pay more. The analogy could be the same, he could say you run more clients or more intensive stuff on it, so your cabinet should costs more. Or if a leased server provider starts to charge you more based on the profits you make per server. So, no I don't think its fair.

    The analogy of can put more customers on it and then make money is exactly the point why you should not charge more based on that assumption. A provider with a dual quad core, uses more power then someone with a celeron, not to mention parts and server depreciation each year, your investment loses allot more value each day. If you have more customers, you have more support costs as well. Now comes the interesting part, how much money you would actually save with this license model instead of investment on hardware and going with apache open source instead? The performance gain is rendered by their license cost.

    This is an investment. I dont know if apache will develop the same or better features next year, rendering the litespeed investment to less.

    If you have to pay 4800$ for a 16 core machine, then you start to think if its not better just to buy another one. So the 50% more customers you can put per server comes with a cost, the same it would cost you just to deploy more hardware. If you have an 8 core server, its 2400$. Plus anual update fee each year per server.

    I don't see how you can pass the savings on. Thats exactly why I see that shared hosting providers that offer litespeed offer it as an addon and charge it as a feature to the client. For example, move to litespeed for 10$ extra a month. There are providers that use it as default, sure, but almost all providers I saw offer it as an option of value not as as a standard deployment. This means my assumption is correct, they dont save as much, they need to pass the cost on the client.

    As a client that probably runs his own website, its a good model. He only needs 1 server, and he buys a owned license, with time he starts to upgrade servers core, and upgrades his license.

    For a hosting provider, that uses it as a shared hosting, with allot of servers, where costs need to be passed to each client, its not.

    The more you grow as a hosting company, or the bigger you are, the less sense it would make.
    Last edited by PYDOT; 09-30-2009 at 11:36 AM.

  6. #31
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    There is a few things that have been brought up in this thread that show some lack of understanding with LiteSpeed.

    1. The content thing I had asked them about this when we deployed it and I basically said we're not going to restrict content. We're not content police and if that's an issue you're going to need to tell me now. It was not an issue according to them. Now I don't know if this is because we don't advertise hosting this stuff it just sort of happens when you're not keeping checks on content. Or it's because they don't care anymore and they need to update their AUP to reflect this.
    2. The CPU cores is the second issue that keeps being brought up. The LiteSpeed instance is what the cores are for. If you're serving 100% static traffic on a 8 CPU system you'd get your most bang having a 8 core license as you'll be maxing out the CPU with the litespeed process. If you're doing shared web hosting where most CPU is taken by PHP you do not need a 8 core license for a 8 core machine. You need 1 core or 2 core max most likely.

      We typically use 2 core licenses but others use 1 core it's totally up to the provider. The advantage of two is you've split the i/o load between two processes. So in the grand scheme litespeed takes more i/o so it's better at handling higher i/o wait. They are working on having AIO though so this will be less of an issue.



    As far as everything else I'd say the big advantage is it's compatible with Apache. You'd love to use nginx or lighttpd for your shared hosting server but you also need to have near 100% apache compatibility. People will want their mod_rewrite rules working the same as well as other Apache only features. LiteSpeed can read the httpd.conf and htaccess files and can replicate Apache. It can also of course read it's own configuration files.

    Now as far as Apache's performance if you don't need ssl and are not scared by experimental you could try mpm_event. If my memory serves me right all the high performance web servers are event driven
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  7. #32
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    Hhm... time to make a commercial httpd that has the same features as litespeed and can read both Apache and litespeed config files. I'm sure they won't object to their config files being used by a competitor, given that they do the same with Apache. Two can play that game

    TonyB: good analysis regarding cores. In fact, I think that just using 1 single core is more than enough. Since the application is entirely separate from the webserver (via fastcgi), nothing is stopping you from using all cores for e.g. PHP for free.
    There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't.

  8. #33
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    This thread is very informative. Glad I started it. We were going to use lighttpd, but after looking through it we would of had alot of problems since we were switching from Apache.

    - Daniel

  9. #34
    You can read here about cores and licensing:
    http://www.litespeedtech.com/support...ead.php?t=1660

    So you can easly get away with 1 core license for 4 core server, and of course they do not count Intels HT as additional cores.
    I have server with 4 cores and I use license for one core which is more than enough. My IOwait is only 1%, if it was 10% I would easly buy additional license and just replaced it without any reinstallation or anything.
    I would use nginx but my sites use rewrite so I needed something that is fully compatible with Apache.
    I'm using LiteSpeed server for almost a year and I didn't had any downtime, in that period i was attacked with DDOS for more than 10 times. Site load was high but LiteSpeed was always responsive, while on apache when i switched to test server load went to 100 and everything died.

  10. #35
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    What's interesting is there is no proper, up to date benchmark for stuff like dynamic content (php) of Litespeed (2-core-ent) and say nginx + fastcgi (or whatever the optimal setup is), neither from vendor nor from anywhere else...

    Has anyone did such tests in recent time?

  11. #36
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    Related question: do you know of resellers of litespeed licenses with cheaper prices? i've found this one: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=702669 but it's a post from a year ago...

    Regards,
    www.FactoriaDigital.com - Application web hosting & specialized wordpress hosting, in spanish

  12. #37
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    I'll take nginx over LiteSpeed any day.

    FOSS (>LS) + human-readable configuration (>A), and I seriously doubt LiteSpeed can beat nginx performance by any amount that matters.

    Quote Originally Posted by Sergej View Post
    What's interesting is there is no proper, up to date benchmark for stuff like dynamic content (php) of Litespeed (2-core-ent) and say nginx + fastcgi (or whatever the optimal setup is), neither from vendor nor from anywhere else...

    Has anyone did such tests in recent time?
    I'd be happy to, if somebody would buy me a 4-core Litespeed license.
    Last edited by petteyg359; 10-04-2009 at 12:11 PM.
    [GB ≠ GiB] [MB ≠ MiB] [kB ≠ kiB] [1000 ≠ 1024] [Giga ≠ gram] [Mega ≠ milli] [Kelvin ≠ kilo] [Byte ≠ bit]
    There is no millibit. There is no gram-bit. There is no Kelvin-Byte.

  13. #38
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    Quote Originally Posted by petteyg359 View Post
    I'll take nginx over LiteSpeed any day.

    FOSS (>LS) + human-readable configuration (>A), and I seriously doubt LiteSpeed can beat nginx performance by any amount that matters.



    I'd be happy to, if somebody would buy me a 4-core Litespeed license.
    You can submit a request for a 4-core trial license from them.

  14. #39
    Quote Originally Posted by petteyg359 View Post
    I'll take nginx over LiteSpeed any day.

    FOSS (>LS) + human-readable configuration (>A), and I seriously doubt LiteSpeed can beat nginx performance by any amount that matters.
    You still do not get the point, nginx cannot read .htaccess so on my site I cannot make SEO friendly urls.
    I'm using nginx also on some servers where i don't need cpanel and .htaccess, but for shared hosting litespeed is excellent.
    I'm using with 4 cores just one license and it is working great like plug and play.

  15. #40
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bono_ View Post
    nginx cannot read .htaccess so on my site I cannot make SEO friendly urls.
    Making "SEO friendly" URLs should be the responsibility of the application, not the web server. This is why Apache is so <insert-adjective>. It tries to do everything, when all it should be doing is serving HTTP.

    Quote Originally Posted by Bono_ View Post
    I'm using nginx also on some servers where i don't need cpanel and .htaccess
    There's a thread on this forum from a person that will replace Apache on a cPanel server with nginx. I don't know whether he's got a method to support .htaccess files, but cPanel will run on nginx with a bit of setup.
    [GB ≠ GiB] [MB ≠ MiB] [kB ≠ kiB] [1000 ≠ 1024] [Giga ≠ gram] [Mega ≠ milli] [Kelvin ≠ kilo] [Byte ≠ bit]
    There is no millibit. There is no gram-bit. There is no Kelvin-Byte.

  16. #41
    I didn't said it cannot be done, just it is too much work to set it up.
    If you want to run nginx, you can run it without cpanel. I checked most popular CMS (drupal, joomla, wordpress) and for all of them rewrite rules are available for nginx.

    So in my case I have differentiate those 3 web servers,

    shared hosting, cpanel I use LiteSpeed
    big site on server nginx
    small sites that do not have much traffic apache.

  17. #42
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    Bono has explained pretty much why litespeed for us, shared hosting.

    In fact, we are currently using nginx now, but only for serving static content, dynamic content is passed to apache.

    We want to trial test litespeed soon to see if there is a big difference on dynamic content or if it is not worth it. NGINX for static files has supposed a big difference.

    Regards,
    www.FactoriaDigital.com - Application web hosting & specialized wordpress hosting, in spanish

  18. #43
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    Also, has someone tested litespeed (Dynamic) + nginx (static)? that's the config they use at wordpress.com, i think they also use varnish but not sure.

    Regards,
    www.FactoriaDigital.com - Application web hosting & specialized wordpress hosting, in spanish

  19. #44
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    I've seen this thread: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...t=apache+nginx

    Here they say that a fine tuned apache 2.2 with worker mpm can have the same performance than litespeed for dynamic content.

    Opinions?
    www.FactoriaDigital.com - Application web hosting & specialized wordpress hosting, in spanish

  20. #45
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    Quote Originally Posted by Factor View Post
    Here they say that a fine tuned apache 2.2 with worker mpm can have the same performance than litespeed for dynamic content.

    Opinions?
    It echoes our experience with it. Apache out of the box performs like garbage, but with some tuning it can be made to perform great (for but one example: a sick little Pentium4 went from server load ~4.5 to server load ~0.25 after only Apache tuning). If you're not interested in messing with tuning, pay money to Litespeed...
    I used to run the oldest commercial Mumble host.

  21. #46
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    Quote Originally Posted by fwaggle View Post
    It echoes our experience with it. Apache out of the box performs like garbage, but with some tuning it can be made to perform great (for but one example: a sick little Pentium4 went from server load ~4.5 to server load ~0.25 after only Apache tuning). If you're not interested in messing with tuning, pay money to Litespeed...
    In the same spirit a tuned Litespeed will substantially out perform a tuned Apache.

  22. #47
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    Quote Originally Posted by IRCCo Jeff View Post
    In the same spirit a tuned Litespeed will substantially out perform a tuned Apache.
    Let's not get too crazy - any information / evidence to back this up? In what sense would it substantially outperform Apache? When serving static files? PHP files? Using what method (FCGI, Module, etc)?

    I'm a proponent of Litespeed, especially in a shared environment - that being said pissing matches / extraordinary claims require at least some benchmarking & evidence.
    Cody R.
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  23. #48
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    It might, but to me it's not worth the high cost of ownership on performance alone. Some of the other features are pretty nice, though.

    It just irks me how they compare litespeed to Apache's Prefork MPM, which everyone knows performs terribly. I don't consider myself an Apache tuning expert by any stretch of the imagination, and my Apache benchmarks pretty close to equal clear up to maxing out a 10mbps VPS I was running AB from, 800 requests concurrency 100. The numbers are very slightly in favor of litespeed of course, but not enough to warrant the boast of "2x as fast as Apache!"

    I still stand behind my original statement, that if you don't want to bother configuring Apache then Litespeed makes a great drop-in replacement, particularly for cPanel servers... the benchmarks just bug me though.
    I used to run the oldest commercial Mumble host.

  24. #49
    Quote Originally Posted by fwaggle View Post
    It might, but to me it's not worth the high cost of ownership on performance alone. Some of the other features are pretty nice, though.

    It just irks me how they compare litespeed to Apache's Prefork MPM, which everyone knows performs terribly. I don't consider myself an Apache tuning expert by any stretch of the imagination, and my Apache benchmarks pretty close to equal clear up to maxing out a 10mbps VPS I was running AB from, 800 requests concurrency 100. The numbers are very slightly in favor of litespeed of course, but not enough to warrant the boast of "2x as fast as Apache!"

    I still stand behind my original statement, that if you don't want to bother configuring Apache then Litespeed makes a great drop-in replacement, particularly for cPanel servers... the benchmarks just bug me though.
    Do you have any evidence of this? Apache can be tuned but I don't think it gets close to litespeed, there is a reason why people are willing to spend hundreds or even thousands for their license. By your comment, it sounds as they are just lazy and prefer to pay for a tuned web server out of the box, which doesn't make sense, since with the cost of litespeed you could hire the best apache expert and basically put your server in shape.

    I don't run litespeed, but im also wondered why nobody posted benchmarks except litespeed of course which is biased to their product. But you have a point here, if litespeed outperforms apache so match, it would be just plain silly that apache would decide not to implement similar features. I agree that Apache out of the box sucks, but im not sure how much you can push it to be close to litespeed without affecting stability. A fast server is worthless if it crashes all the time. Litespeed not only claims to outperform apache by 2 to 4 times but it also advertises its more secure and even can mitigate small dos attacks. I wonder what litespeed is really up to the task besides their nice admin tools. It would be nice to compare real live scenarios.

  25. #50
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    Quote Originally Posted by CodyRo View Post
    Let's not get too crazy - any information / evidence to back this up? In what sense would it substantially outperform Apache? When serving static files? PHP files? Using what method (FCGI, Module, etc)?

    I'm a proponent of Litespeed, especially in a shared environment - that being said pissing matches / extraordinary claims require at least some benchmarking & evidence.
    I've not published a benchmark but my company is paying thousands each month for licensing on software I could be getting for free if it weren't actually performing as advertised.

    End game is that Litespeed is either a) really great or b) i'm really stupid.

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