For those of you who are not exactly clued up on the web hosting industry or what these two names even mean, let us start by giving you a quick background check. 

Apache is the most popular as well as the oldest type of free server. Overall, it’s used by 44% of the 2016 Fortune Global 500 companies. However, it has a competitor named LiteSpeed which has challenged its supremacy over the years and has very slowly been adopted by a few larger companies. All this competition brings about one deeming question, which one is better?

Here we will analyze every aspect of each web server and tell you exactly which one you should be using for your business or website.

Apache

It would make sense to begin discussing the most popular of the two. Apache was introduced in the early 90s by two highly enthusiastic website developers who simply wanted to create and develop websites. Little did they know they had just embarked on an online revolution by creating a major game changer of the modern internet. With major growth and development over the years, the Apache server became one of the most stable and secure servers available, and since it also has the ability to load in components, it remains one of the most flexible and versatile as well. And the price? It is completely free.

Every Linux web server comes pre-installed with Apache. Unless you really dig in and look for alternatives, you are not likely to even know about Litespeed.

Litespeed

Unlike their rivals, Litespeed is a relatively new form of software that took the market by storm in 2002. This web server was designed to read Apache configuration files and the software can ultimately be dropped in to replace any Apache server. As its name suggests, Litespeed is a version, that a single Litespeed server can handle the same amount of traffic as two Apache servers.

The main downside is that it is essentially a commercial product, which means you got to pay money for it. Which is a pretty tough trait to have when your competitor is offering a free product.

The Breakdown

 Every Linux web server comes pre-installed with Apache. Unless you really dig in and look for alternatives, you are not likely to even know about Litespeed.

Yes, LiteSpeed is indeed a viable drop-in replace to Apache, but it might be an overkill for many, especially if they are paying for it.

We will take a chance and assume that you are not a tech guru, and is here for business advice. So, I’ll spare you the tech talk and tech specifications of each Web server.

If you want to get a straight forward answer then Litespeed is better than Apache. Litespeed increases the performance of each website, it improves security and it reduces hardware costs. Here at Krepling, we put all of our user’s online businesses and websites on our Litespeed cloud server, so if you choose to host or build your business at Krepling, you are pretty much getting Litespeed for free and no comparison is needed.

However, If you are not hosting at Krepling we believe the major component that each individual will be accessing when choosing between the two is price. Since Apache is free and Litespeed isn’t, the comparison all boils down to “is it worth paying for Litespeed?” or “Do I really need it?”.

For Business Websites

 People who would use WordPress or Joomla or Drupal to set up a website would often make it beautiful using several modules and images.

All those files make a website heavy. Each page will need 50 or more resources and the total size could easily exceed 1 MB. Now, add to that more than 20 simultaneous visitors.

Stock Apache with default configuration in a 2 GB VPS is going to crawl under that load. Apache’s latest version made a valiant effort to perform better under these kinds of load using something called an Event MPM, but it still couldn’t match the performance of other free web-servers such as Nginx.

Did you see I wrote “Free”? Yes, there are free alternatives to handle high traffic in static content heavy websites.

You really don’t have to choose a paid option such as LiteSpeed if you have a simple website with no database heavy loads. Here at Krepling, we offer Litespeed as part of all of our hosting plans and business building plans regardless of your needs and don’t charge any extra costs.

For Blogs, Publishers, and Forums

 The next popular category of websites that we’ve seen outside of Krepling is online publishers, who release many articles every day and receive thousands of hits a day.

These sites have equal load on the database and the static content. So, during high traffic, the stress falls as much on Apache as it does on PHP engine and the Database.

In many such sites, we’ve seen the performance issue with Apache, which is again what lead us to strike a deal with Litespeed in order to offer it for free to all of our users.

For Large E-Commerce Websites

 E-Commerce sites, especially those with a large number of products are notoriously prone to performance issues when running on Apache.

They have many ways to sort, filter and display products that the sheer number of permutations and combinations itself can overwhelm normal 2 GB VPSs or Servers.

Add to that session handling variables, and things can get quite difficult for an out of the box Apache server.

An easy solution adopted by many sites is to use LiteSpeed + LiteMage extension or Nginx + Tuerpentine extension. While the former is paid, the later is free. Again there are not a lot of hosting companies or e-commerce platforms that offer such a combination as it is a cost on their half.

Regardless of which solution you choose, it is necessary to customize the server settings to match your site traffic and load if you are not building your e-commerce site on Krepling.

Further, it is not enough to configure it once and forget it. Traffic to your site changes every month. The size of your code base changes (with new features, extensions, etc.). So, you’ll need to continually adjust the server settings to keep your site loading fast.

That is why we recommend starting an e-commerce store with an e-commerce platform, regardless of what web server they offer. It’s just less hassle on your end.

Again, without being bias, we saw a lot of performance issues with later e-commerce platforms purely because they chose to use the wrong web server. Shopify for example run Ruby on Rails and serve it using Unicorn, Apache, and Kafka. They probably use Nginx as well as their own cache solutions.

We found Litespeed to be the most effective for e-commerce sites but also found it to be too expensive as a commercial product which is why we offer if for free when using our platform. 

Conclusion

 Apache is the reigning king of web servers, but in its out-of-the-box configuration, it can cause performance lags. Today, we’ve taken a look at Litespeed vs Apache comparison in a business perspective.

Regardless of your business type, you should always opt for Litespeed, we understand it’s not cheap, which is why we offer it free at Krepling when you host or build your business with us.

If you are already hosting your business with another platform you may need an Apache tune-up, a server optimization, Nginx front-end, and in some select cases Litespeed. If you are not on Krepling at the moment have a web server expert audit your server to exactly identify where your performance bottleneck is, and get a solution that works best.