Is Openlitespeed worth it, or go straight to enterprise?

N

NTT

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New DA user here, but not new to web hosting. I'm just getting back to offering shared hosting to others after about a decade off.

In the mean-time I've been running a busy site on nginx, and I've tweaked, and tweaked, and tweaked to try and get that time to first bite lower on a php-based site. And it can be tough. It looks like LiteSpeed might solve speed issues and might be wonderful, but I don't have any users and I don't want to start paying $550 per year for Litespeed Enterprise before I have any paying customers, on top of the costs of DA, cloudlinux, etc.

Makes sense so far, right? Don't need it, but if it makes for a faster site for my users (and better rankings) then I want it.

Anyway, it looks like I can configure things a couple of ways before I go live:
  • I can leave things as-is on Apache, with the plan to migrate to something faster once I have a few clients
  • (I can install nginx-apache and use nginx as a cache, but I'm inclined not to do this for now. )
  • I can install openlitespeed, and make a cron job to look for changed .htaccess files, with the plan to move on to the paid version if/when justified.
So I wanted to ask: is the openlitespeed install worth it? Is it reasonably trouble-free (figure mostly wordpress-based web sites)? When things break is the documentation available to point in the right direction?

Or would you recommend I don't touch the defaults until I want to go full Enterprise version? Or is the whole Litespeed web server overhyped when caches and CDNs are used properly? (It looks like it lowers time to first byte which can be important, so ....)
 
I suppose I'll get a few sites migrated, run some tests, and if I think openlitespeed might speed things up I'll run some test and report back.
 
OLS has been amazing for me, previously using Apache+nginx.
It works just fine with WordPress and .htaccess files. See here.
I believe OLS and Enterprise are mostly the same as well especially where performance is concerned. OLS comes with all the nice features such as QUIC and HTTP/3 support.
 
Is OLS any good? Not sure what the benefit for a (good) front-end for PHP-FPM is? I mean, if FPM does most of the work, right?

The only thing I wouldn't like is the constant 'reloading' for .htaccess files.
 
You should start directly with Litespeed if you want to offer shared hosting. You don't need to go directly with Litespeed Enterprise license, you could start with Essential or if you have < 8 GB Memory you could start with Lite. If you want for long time business i advise you to go with owned license.
 
OLS worth for simple sites, as it supports rewrite rules, but that's it. Usually .htaccess contains more than that.

Is there any specific installing LS Enterprise, not OLS in DA?

Update. Yes, there is: "./build litespeed" instead of "./build openlitespeed".
 
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So what is the verdict after almost a year on this ?
Is OLS a good free option compared to Apache + Nginx or not?
What else have you learned on this topic?
 
I use OLS on my "managed" customers server, most of them are WordPress, and only make minor changes just to content. And it works fine for that. I don't use it for regular servers because customers get confused when they make changes to .htaccess files and the changes are not picked up as they are cached until reload/restart of OLS. Whenever I get enough customers that are willing to pay enough more to cover the licence, I will setup a Enterprise LS server.
 
Its absolutely worth it. Try OLS first, run load tests, watch it for a few month, and then you can decide to switch for payed version or not. Payed version has a few additional advantages.
 
Some ecommerce platforms like prestashop still don't fully support OLS. If customers demand WordPress, then having OLS or LS is good.. I prefer to use nginx_apache when using DA because a lot of documentation in DA is about apache and nginx. And using the combination of nginx_apache has better performance than using a single web server (nginx or apache). People always say litespeed is faster than nginx but never gave the benchmark, how fast it is compared to nginx... Try compare the dynamic + static site then. All I see litespeed has too much marketing on the internet. And the benchmark site URL on google mostly owned by the company itself.
 
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