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Litespeed Webserver, the latest addition to the hosting landscape, has been met with growing enthusiasm by numerous hosting companies and systems engineers over the past year. Litespeed is presented as the definitive solution to maximize performance, but the attraction for a system that promises excellence in exchange for a monthly subscription is perhaps not symptomatic of a lack of technical expertise on the part of hosting companies and self-styled systems engineers who should instead have any?
It would be interesting to hypothesize which direction the aforementioned hosting companies would have taken without the help of Litespeed, and above all what they sold to their customers up to a year ago. There is a real risk that they would have gotten lost in the quicksand of incompetence. However, with Litespeed, even those with limited knowledge of systems engineering can achieve very advanced results. It's a similar concept to the iPhone camera: it allows you to get high-quality shots without necessarily having to master technical settings such as ISO or white balance; however, on specific situations and demanding customers they will never be able to compete with a professional optical back and a photographer with a theoretical background worthy of respect and years of practice on high performance systems.
It's important to note that for the end customer, the difference between a semi-professional system like Litespeed and a combination of superior technologies like Varnish/NGINX, used by major organizations and projects like Wikipedia or the New York Times , may not be immediately apparent. Litespeed, in fact, doesn't offer the same level of customization and technical detail found in Varnish's VCL language or the sophisticated configurations possible with the experience of an experienced system administrator.
Certainly, Litespeed offers some enticing features like caching, compression, and support for WebP images. What about the brotli squeeze? Impressive, for sure. However, when comparing Litespeed to a standard Apache webserver or a basic NGINX webserver without advanced features like FastCGI Cache or Proxy Cache, it might look like a miracle solution. But are we really ready to set Litespeed as the standard for high-traffic, high-speed sites?
Litespeed is unable to compete with flagship solutions such as NGINX and Varnish, which are adopted by web giants such as Wikipedia, ANSA or the New York Times. These organizations have well-defined needs and are not satisfied with compromises, preferring superior solutions over products like Litespeed.
It's also essential to look critically at Litespeed's benchmarks. Even if these data aren't as fake as some have suggested, they seem to paint a partial picture. They don't take into account optimal NGINX configurations, such as enabling FastCGI Cache, nor do they provide a proper comparison with an enterprise-level caching system like Varnish, which isn't even considered in their benchmarks.
In fact, their benchmarks could be perceived as partial and not entirely representative of reality and above all absolutely implausible as already pointed out by the Reddit community who have widely criticized the proposed benchmarks resulting from their technical support: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/f06vse/litespeed_servers_seem_like_a_marketing_scam_are/
Regardless of the opinions we find on Reddit, however, market opinion doesn't seem to confirm Litespeed as the undisputed leader. An analysis of SimilarTech's statistics shows that the number of sites among the top 10000 globally that actually use Litespeed isn't that high.
When analyzing the chart above, " Varnish VS Litespeed ," it's clear that Varnish is used by nearly 9% of the top 10.000 sites globally, a remarkable figure. However, it's important to note that SimilarTech's statistics are based solely on HTTP headers detected during its scans, and not all Varnish installations use easily identifiable standard HTTP headers. This means that, in reality, there could be many more Varnish installations among the top 10.000 sites than indicated.
By contrast, LiteSpeed's statistics tend to be more accurate. In fact, LiteSpeed Webserver has a tendency to add specific and easily recognizable headers, making it easier for scanning tools like SimilarTech to identify it.
One more thing to consider is that Varnish does not terminate the HTTPS connection, which can further skew the data. To get a more accurate view of the relative use of these technologies, it would therefore be more appropriate to compare NGINX and LiteSpeed, as illustrated in the chart below.
Analyzing the “ NGINX VS Litespeed ” chart , it’s strikingly clear that NGINX dominates the landscape by a wide margin, accounting for 25% of installations across the top 10.000 websites globally. This contrasts with Litespeed’s modest 1,37%, which is practically insignificant from a statistical standpoint. In environments where optimal performance is paramount, such as those represented by the top 10.000 websites globally, the choice to use NGINX as a web server is a clear demonstration of its robustness, flexibility, and advanced customization capabilities. Litespeed’s limited use in this context underscores its relative positioning as a less favored solution for high-performance deployments.
To further support and consolidate the conclusions reached so far, we can refer to the data provided by SimilarTech to identify the most significant sites that use NGINX and LiteSpeed as web server technologies, respectively. When we consider the top 500 sites worldwide, we enter a context where budget constraints do not represent an obstacle to the adoption of solutions like LiteSpeed Web Server, if they were considered superior.
We can see from the graph below that at least 10 sites among the top 90 websites worldwide use NGINX as their WebServer, one of which ranks eighth in terms of traffic.
Instead, we find that Litespeed is used by practically anonymous sites starting from the 331st place with certainly interesting traffic of 142 million visits per month, but greatly reduced compared, for example, to the 2,8 billion of the eighth site in the world by traffic. managed by NGINX WebServer.
We must necessarily consider that if, in this area, LiteSpeed's use remains marginal compared to NGINX, we must interpret this trend as a demonstration of the latter's superiority in terms of performance, flexibility, and customization capabilities. Organizations managing websites of this size are looking for the best available technologies, and if they opt for NGINX rather than LiteSpeed, it reflects a technical assessment based on which NGINX is deemed better suited to meet their high-level needs.
Therefore, Litespeed's benchmarks shouldn't be considered as the only reference nor should they be the promises of hosting companies that for obvious reasons try to sell their solution that they know how to use. There are multiple aspects to consider that Litespeed seems to leave out.
Costs of Litespeed licenses passed on to the end customer.
Unlike NGINX and Varnish, LiteSpeed Web Server incurs significant licensing costs, which are inevitably passed on to the end customer. For example, it's common to find that the cost of the LiteSpeed Enterprise software license alone exceeds that of the dedicated server itself. This represents an additional expense for the hosting provider and the end customer that could be avoided by adopting complex solutions like NGINX and Varnish, if properly configured. In a practical example, a dedicated server could save approximately €1300 per year, including taxes, on the software license cost.
This raises a fundamental question: what are the motivations of a hosting provider to invest such large sums in licenses that might be unnecessary if they had the systems expertise needed to configure an NGINX + Varnish software stack? After all, these are the same technologies adopted by prominent companies like Wikipedia and the New York Times. Presumably, the answer lies in a combination of LiteSpeed's ease of use and a lack of expertise needed to effectively implement and manage an NGINX and Varnish-based solution.
Wikipedia, one of the world's most visited online resources, uses a highly customized and optimized software stack to handle its enormous volume of traffic and requests. The core of the stack is based on Linux as the operating system, with web servers primarily powered by NGINX, renowned for its efficiency and scalability.
Additionally, Wikipedia relies on Varnish for HTTP caching , an extremely effective solution for accelerating content delivery speed. Varnish is known for its extremely detailed configuration capabilities, allowing Wikipedia to customize the cache to suit the unique structure and requirements of its content.
Regarding value, cost is a key issue. While Litespeed may seem affordable at first glance, a €90 monthly license per server might make you reconsider. Why choose a product that can't compete with its rivals at a similar price? Why not invest in enterprise-level solutions like NGINX and Varnish, which offer superior performance and customization without the high monthly licensing costs?
In conclusion, while Litespeed may appear attractive to those looking for an “easy” option, those looking for exceptional performance and advanced customization should consider enterprise-grade solutions such as NGINX and Varnish. We shouldn't settle for less when it comes to technology, because we deserve the best.
