LiteSpeed Web Server

Key Advantages of LiteSpeed Web Server

Enhanced PHP Performance and Security:
LiteSpeed’s LSAPI improves the speed and stability of dynamic web pages, offering up to 50% better performance than Apache with mod_php. It reduces overhead by forking new processes from a constantly running parent process. Each PHP process runs under the user account that owns it, ensuring better resource management and security. This isolation means a compromised user account cannot access other users’ files. LiteSpeed also supports PHP configuration in .htaccess, unlike phpsuexec or suphp.

Efficient Gzip Compression:
LiteSpeed’s gzip compression feature accelerates page load times and conserves bandwidth by compressing files sent to browsers. This can be enabled for specific data types at various levels and can create pre-gzipped files for immediate delivery.

Intelligent Keep Alive Management:
LiteSpeed smartly manages Keep Alive settings, enabling it for media content like images, CSS, and JavaScript, but not for dynamic content (e.g., PHP), optimizing RAM usage.

Resource-Efficient Event-Driven Architecture:
LiteSpeed efficiently handles all connections using minimal processes, conserving resources. This architecture allows it to manage many clients concurrently with reduced memory and CPU usage, enhancing overall server performance.

Robust DDoS Protection:
LiteSpeed offers per-IP connection, request, and bandwidth throttling to block IPs that make excessive connections or requests, or use too much bandwidth. It can also identify targeted sites during attacks via its real-time statistics console.

External Application Firewall Protection:
LiteSpeed can forward requests to external applications (CGI, FastCGI, web server, servlet engine, LSAPI, etc.) for dynamic content generation. It can cap external application resource usage to prevent DoS attacks that target your applications.

Chroot Isolation for Enhanced Security:
LiteSpeed’s chroot function allows you to place an individual web application, virtual host, or the entire web server in a virtual root directory (“jail”), limiting access outside this directory. This containment prevents attacks on a single application or user from affecting the rest of the system.