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What do you guys think about LiteSpeed pricing? Still competitive or meh?
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What do you guys think about LiteSpeed pricing? Still competitive or meh?

marcmmarcm Member
edited February 2014 in General

I was looking into it, however I don't find their pricing appealing at all. Our shared hosting nodes are all SSD cached, 12 Core E5 servers. I feel that by getting a 4 core or 8 core license I am just limiting our customers. Then again I can spend that money on upgrading storage on those servers. Apache 2.4 with MPM event, Nginx and/or Varnish in front of it seems plenty fast. Our customers are happy and I feel that they should be able to use all of the server's resources.

So, what do you guys think? Is LiteSpeed worth getting? Or is it just a badge these days meant to be put on your site next to CloudLinux and cPanel in order to attract more customers?

With managed CMS offerings such as those from WPEngine.com I see potential customers caring less about the underlying platforms and more about the end result.

This is just my two cents. What's yours?

Thanked by 1lsmichael
LiteSpeed Poll
  1. Is LiteSpeed too expensive for what it offers? Is the pricing scheme wrong?81 votes
    1. Yes
      87.65%
    2. No
      12.35%
«1

Comments

  • jhjh Member

    I think it's overpriced. I think the key selling point is actually the name.

  • Me i use, CloudLinux + CageFS which works great with LiteSpeed, which only this things cost me over $40 per mo without cPanel license, and i have multiple servers :) but i have no problems at all :) no hackers and no slow apache :)

    Thanked by 1lsmichael
  • It is overpriced, though Openlitespeed has been good for our clients usage.

    Thanked by 1lsmichael
  • @Zen said:
    Nginx will work just as well with no CPU limitations. Most people are limiting their servers because they don't want to pay the license for a higher CPU limit.

    There is a CPU limit you have to buy a license to get rid of?

  • And I thought it's based on actual servers, so 1-cpu license is for one server instance.

  • Zen said: I was under the impression (correct me if I'm wrong) that they license based on CPU. I've seen many LiteSpeed configs so far licensed under their CPU count.

    My understanding is that it's licensed per CPU core. If it would be licensed per CPU socket then I could understand the pricing scheme somewhat. If anyone could shed some light on this please it'd be awesome.

  • DalComp said: Their page says it is based on CPU core(s).

    That's what I thought. That would have made sense in 2006, but not today.

    Of course if it works for them and providers are giving them money then more power to them. Though I would say that if they would change their pricing scheme to something more acceptable, they would reach a broader audience and gain more customers. Existing customers would be relieved as well. The American economic model dictates mass production/mass consumption. It's how companies make money in America. Most companies want to make their products affordable for the masses (except for cellular providers of course, they will make you swallow their ridiculous pricing). In hosting there are always alternatives. I don't know, I'd like to see LiteSpeed priced better with more people using it. But if not, thanks God for the alternatives.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    I hate that per core pricing model. It should have died with dual core nodes. Honestly though I still love Apache. I get far more enjoyment out of tweaking it to perfection than installing hipster replacements. But like you said...it's all about that badge on the website.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    I think people are missing an important point: LiteSpeed is 100% Apache compatible.

    If you've got a VPS and you're the only user, you're savvy, etc., then yes, nginx + php-fpm all the way (or whatever other recipe you want).

    If you've got 100 cPanel customers who copy/paste .htaccess rules from google, that's not an option. LiteSpeed gives you hugely increased performance with full compatibility.

    LiteSpeed's bread and butter really is the "we want apache compatibility" cPanel hosting market.

    Thanked by 2Dylan vRozenSch00n
  • shovenoseshovenose Member, Host Rep

    If only I was $5/yr/server would be much

  • I think with the performance increases in apache 2.4, and alternative web servers coming out (see http://gwan.com/benchmark), i feel like litespeed's days are numbered. i think the biggest selling point for it was that it was fully apache compatible and could be easily integrated with cPanel, but with nginx and varnish plugins for cpanel, thats being less and less relevant.

    and there are cpu/memory limits per license. personally, i wouldnt use it. but everyone has their own opinions

  • Sorry, I meant nginx - I thought this post

    @Zen said:
    Nginx will work just as well with no CPU limitations. Most people are limiting their servers because they don't want to pay the license for a higher CPU limit.

    Was meaning that nginx had a CPU limitation which was completely news to me.

    I know that Lightspeed does have CPU limitations and per core licensing.

  • It has ALWAYS been meh.

    Go nginx, or go home.

    Thanked by 2GIANT_CRAB William
  • I would think most of your load is typically CGI or database related. Certainly there are exceptions.

    I'd expect on a modern CPU, you could serve a lot of HTTP requests with only a couple of cores using a "modern" web server? Correct me if I am wrong.

  • Wintereise said: Go nginx, or go home.

    I'm already at home. What do.

    Thanked by 3Monsta_AU Mark_R jar
  • LSAPI is actually 'faster,' but not really by enough to matter.

    When you really need to scale -- none of these will really prevent it.

  • No adult content with Litespeed. 'Nuff said.

  • im not a fans of litespeed since it not worth for their price.

    Go for Apache + varnish cache if it for shared hosting node

    Thanked by 1vRozenSch00n
  • @tuguhost said:
    im not a fans of litespeed since it not worth for their price.

    Go for Apache + varnish cache if it for shared hosting node

    You should try Apache + openlighspeed :)

  • marcmmarcm Member

    raindog308 said: I think people are missing an important point: LiteSpeed is 100% Apache compatible.

    If you've got a VPS and you're the only user, you're savvy, etc., then yes, nginx + php-fpm all the way (or whatever other recipe you want).

    If you've got 100 cPanel customers who copy/paste .htaccess rules from google, that's not an option. LiteSpeed gives you hugely increased performance with full compatibility.

    LiteSpeed's bread and butter really is the "we want apache compatibility" cPanel hosting market.

    All very good and very valid points, however these days you can use Apache 2.4 + MPM Event + Varnish Cache and get extremely good results. I want LiteSpeed to be around for a very long time and I'm just trying to signal that their pricing scheme is outdated. I know they think that shared hosting is some kind of gold mine where you cram thousands of users on one server, however that's not the case for us. And I doubt it's the case for many others. LiteSpeed might have been 9 times faster than Apache back in the 2.0/2.2 days, but that's not longer the case. And LiteSpeed without the caching features is about as useless as it gets. Just my two cents of course.

  • @ksubedi said:
    i think the biggest selling point for it was that it was fully apache compatible and could be easily integrated with cPanel, but with nginx and varnish plugins for cpanel, thats being less and less relevant.

    Even for those without cPanel & co, it's worth learning about the nginx syntax. I find it much more convenient and flexible than Apache.

    That said, I am all in favor of nginx. If there is a bottleneck in my infrastructure, it's not nginx normally, but one of the backend services (PHP, SQL, etc.). And if I'd really think nginx is not up to the task performance wise, I would rather invest in better hardware than in an alternative webserver software that charges by the number of cores (meh).

  • @lsmichael do the wonder. :P

    Thanked by 1lsmichael
  • marcmmarcm Member
    edited March 2014

    DalComp said: @lsmichael do the wonder. :P

    @DalComp IIRC @Ismichael works for LiteSpeed Tech, right? Maybe he'll have some time to look over this thread :-)

    I would say this then:

    1) If the current pricing model is working for LiteSpeed Tech and is making them a profit then most likely it won't change. After all they are a for profit business and ultimately quality software development is expensive. It would be a shame though as LiteSpeed will stay mostly in the high density shared hosting market IMHO. Or I could be wrong about this.

    2) Maybe their accounting department can crunch some numbers and run some scenarios and predict what happens if the pricing scheme is changed. IMHO the upside to that would be that a broader audience would be reached and more customers would adopt LiteSpeed as their web server of choice. Or alternative plans could be offered in addition to the current plans, like say, per socket licensing. Since most servers are single or dual socket these days, the dual socket license would be the sweet spot. The downside with lowering the pricing is always that current customers will also pay less and that you have to wait for the slack to pick up by gaining new ones.

    This is just an opinion of course, however just from looking around I see two things: one is that the commercial version of LiteSpeed is a desired product, and two, that everyone wishes pricing would be better. Either way it's a good product that people want :-)

    Chumbi said: And if I'd really think nginx is not up to the task performance wise...

    Nginx is a good static content web server, however it's far from being ideal for every task. I'm of the opinion that the right tool for the job should be using. There are however zealots out there who will push Nginx no matter what. It's small, it's cool, it's powerful, I like Nginx, don't get me wrong, however I don't think that it's always the best tool for serving dynamic content.

  • ChumbiChumbi Member
    edited March 2014

    .

  • marcmmarcm Member
    edited March 2014

    Chumbi said: Zealots?

    There was no disrespect intended. I meant it as a general statement when it comes to some folks pushing Nginx as a "cure all" solution. I maintain myself two branches of Nginx with OpenSSL and Naxsi built in (http://repo.phoenixrpm.com). Actually there was a time when I was pushing Nginx hard myself, as a solution for every web server related performance problem. So I apologize, however with my statement I did not mean you specifically.

    Chumbi said: Since when does nginx serve dynamic content? It doesn't (hint: it passes requests to servers that handle dynamic content).

    That's true. Nginx relies on things like PHP-FPM for processing PHP requests.

    Thanked by 1raindog308
  • utamautama Member

    It will be good if anyone from LiteSpeed join this thread crossing finger :) I'm interested but with the price... looking from the sideline is enough.

    Thanked by 1lsmichael
  • nunimnunim Member
    edited March 2014

    I've been playing around with OpenLiteSpeed lately, I hope the commercial version is a lot less confusing. Spend more time in their WebUI than it takes me to install nginx from scratch, and I don't see the claimed performance improvements, however I'm not loading 100 Byte static files like their benchmarks.

    I'll probably try their free Standard edition later to see how that compares to nginx. I manage a lot of cPanel VPS's and I'm always looking to improve performance, I can't believe cPanel still defaults to prefork as event seems to be pretty stable.

  • marcmmarcm Member

    @nunim have you tried serving a heavy Drupal site with it? Honestly I think that most of the performance improvements are in the commercial version.

  • k0nslk0nsl Member

    I'd use it, if it weren't for the price.

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