Why we switched to Litespeed for all cPanel Reseller servers?
For the past 18 years, we’ve been using Apache for all of our cPanel Reseller servers.
However, in the past month, we moved all of our Apache servers to Litespeed.
Today, we are going to show you exactly why we made this move.
What we loved so much about Apache
We’ve had a lot of experience working with Apache over the years. We’ve built our whole infrastructure on top of it, our admins know it inside-out.
It has helped us reach a reliable 99.9% uptime for our servers. It has allowed us to maintain steady growth over the years.
Thanks to the reliability of Apache, its modules, and our knowledge of the platform, we were able to start offering cPanel reseller hosting in 5 data centers across 3 continents.
Litespeed vs Apache – what made us switch
Even though we were quite happy, with Apache, we never shy away from testing new technologies that have the potential to improve our service.
After a prolonged testing period, in which we compared the performance of both Apache and Litespeed in similar environments with similar server tasks, we made the hard choice.
We were going to switch to Litespeed.
The next step was to outfit a few test servers and see how Litespeed fared in our real-world usage and not just in synthetic tests.
We migrated a few servers to Litespeed and the results speak for themselves:
The server load has been reduced across the board, with the same server usage and the same hardware. And reduced server load leads to better stability and improved hardware longevity.
One of the main advantages of the Litespeed web server is its excellent caching system, which works for both static and dynamic content.
It allows for a much better page load speed and, since the content is cached, a reduced server load.
Litespeed Cache
This caching system can be accessed through rewrites in the .htaccess file, but it’s much easier to use one of the handy plugins, that exists for popular web applications.
Synthetic tests show that a basic WordPress installation with a Litespeed caching plugin can deliver results 84X better than what Apache with W3 Total Cache can do.
Using this powerful tool, your customers can create faster websites and have an overall better hosting experience.
The WordPress plugin has been automatically installed on all WordPress instances on the servers. This means that your clients will start enjoying the benefits of the Litespeed cache automatically, without them having to do anything on their own.
Customers using other web applications will have to install manually.
What does this change mean for you as a reseller?
This performance boost has a cost – unlike Apache, Litespeed is commercial software, just like cPanel or WHM.
This means that in order for us to use it, we must pay a monthly license fee.
In other words, we have to raise the prices for our cPanel reseller packages a bit.
Here are the new prices:
These new prices will apply to all existing customers at the start of October. Until then, you can enjoy our new server infrastructure at the old price structure.
Additionally, customers on the cPanel Nano package will also now have a quota of 6 hosting accounts, raised from 5. This change has been already applied to all existing resellers.
Originally published Friday, August 27th, 2021 at 2:32 pm, updated August 27, 2021 and is filed under Latest News, cPanel Reseller Program.