Author: RunCloud Team

Are you wondering how OpenLiteSpeed stacks up against NGINX and Apache? In this article, we’ll be tackling a question our team gets asked frequently: How does OpenLiteSpeed compare to NGINX and Apache?

With our recent launch of OpenLiteSpeed support for everyone using RunCloud to manage their cloud infrastructure, deploying WordPress on OpenLiteSpeed is now just as easy as deploying on NGINX servers. But, how do you choose the best option for your specific needs?

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. In this in-depth discussion, we’ll be taking a closer look at each server stack, including benchmark and testing data, and sharing our thoughts on their performance and resource usage. And while all of these server stacks have established themselves as reliable options in terms of support and security, the real deciding factor comes down to speed and performance at scale. So, let’s get started and see which server comes out on top!

TL;DR – OpenLiteSpeed vs. NGINX vs. Apache

When it comes to performance & scalability – NGINX and OpenLitespeed are both considerably better than Apache as has already been proven by countless performance tests.

So stay tuned, in this detailed breakdown – we’ll be focusing on comparing the OpenLiteSpeed and NGINX stacks running two identical versions of a website on a virtual private server on Google Cloud Platform in the exact same location with identical configuration.

What is a Web Server?

A web server is a software that receives HTTP requests from clients (such as web browsers) and sends back the corresponding HTML pages or other resources. It is responsible for hosting and serving web pages and files to users over the internet or intranet.

Just like a computer, a web server has both software and hardware components working together. Fortunately, thanks to companies like UpCloud, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode & more – the hardware is taken care of for us – while still having the flexibility and freedom to customize your server to suit your needs if you’re deploying with a platform like RunCloud.

What Are The Most Widely-Used Server Stacks?

Apache HTTP Server

Since its introduction in 1995, Apache has cemented itself as the most reliable open-source web server. In fact, nearly 33% of websites around the world run on Apache because of the advantages it offers, which include stability and flexibility. Most developers still use Apache servers up to this day in implementing older applications.

NGINX

As the number of web users continuously increased over the years, various web servers also emerged. Among them was NGINX, which was introduced in 2004. NGINX’s high performance has led many developers to ditch Apache in favor of it. At present, 34% percent of websites around the world use NGINX.

Compared to Apache, NGINX is lighter and better at handling concurrent connections. Furthermore, it allows websites to run faster, which helps them achieve higher rankings on Google.

OpenLiteSpeed Web Server

Another web server that was introduced in 2003 is LiteSpeed. A free version called OpenLiteSpeed was just recently made available to the public for both personal and commercial use. What makes this web server popular is its implementation of a powerful cache engine that optimizes websites at a remarkable rate.

OpenLiteSpeed has some similarities with Apache in terms of its usability. It also uses many of the features that Apache users are already familiar with, such as .htaccess. As for the performance, OpenLiteSpeed resembles the asynchronous event-driven approach of NGINX, so it’s also fast.

Although OpenLiteSpeed is new to the market, it is quickly catching up to Apache and giving NGINX a run for their money. 

Our Testing Environment

All of our tests were run using the standard, VPS server on Google Cloud that features:

• Ubuntu 22.4 LTS
• 2 CPU Core
• 25 GB of Storage
• 4 GB of RAM
• US Central Location

Before we get into the test, it’s already worth mentioning that – when running, on average – OpenLiteSpeed had lower memory usage and slightly lower disk usage for the same web application compared to NGINX.

OpenLiteSpeed Environment

The OpenLiteSpeed test site was running LiteSpeed’s official caching plugin for WordPress and was an otherwise standard, regularly deployed site with no further optimizations.

NGINX Environment

The NGINX test site was running RunCloud Hub with FastCGI Caching enabled.

NGINX vs. OpenLiteSpeed – Core Web Vitals

In case you’ve missed the news, Core Web Vitals are Google’s new performance metrics aiming to truly evaluate the user experience of websites beyond technical metrics. GTmetrix now uses some of the new Core Web Vitals metrics (as well as non-core web vital).

This distills down to the three primary performance metrics:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) which measures loading performance. In order to provide what is considered a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
2. Total Blocking Time (TBT) which is a non-Core Web Vital that measures the total time in milliseconds between the First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Time to Interactive (TTI) where the main thread is blocked long enough to make it unresponsive to user input.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) which measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1 or less.

As you might have guessed & is only reasonable for performance metrics aiming to evaluate true performance for users, these are heavily dependent on the sites themselves as opposed to just the technical responses from a server. This also forms a part of why these tests were performed with the help of one of our customers so that we wouldn’t be using some demo site that isn’t truly indicative of a real business’s website hosted on a server managed by RunCloud.

NGINX & OpenLiteSpeed – GTmetrix Performance Test

In the GTmetrix performance tests, NGINX and OpenLiteSpeed had relatively similar performance. With both performing well, having the same total blocking time, and negligible difference in cumulative layout shift score – the key difference being the largest contentful paint being significantly lower/better (-75ms+) for OpenLiteSpeed.

In other web vitals like First Contentful Paint, Speed Index, Connection Duration, etc. OpenLiteSpeed generally performed better than NGINX across the board. NGINX comes on top in only two metrics – Connection Duration and Fully Loaded Time.

NGINX vs. OpenLiteSpeed – Load Testing

For this next test, we ran a website load test. The purpose of which is to evaluate website performance at scale – i.e. what happens to performance as the number of requests scales.

Learn more about website load testing & how to perform your own tests here.

For these website load tests, we really pushed the limits of the servers. We launched 40 bots from north-america-7 location, playing a testing script, ramping up naturally for 1 minute, then continuing at peak load for 3 minutes, then ramping down naturally for 1 minute with no iteration limit per bot and no iteration limit total.

We also ran a load test using K6 to see if there was a difference in performance when requests come from the local network instead of the internet.

Results For OpenLiteSpeed

OpenLiteSpeed had the mean response time of 0.154s and the 90th percentile time of 0.180s – achieving an average throughput of 26748 hits during the first test.

During this test, the response time slightly fluctuated, but OpenLiteSpeed got the overall 99th percentile time of 0.248s which is pretty good.

In our second test, OpenLiteSpeed completed 149474 requests with 0 errors, thereby achieving a throughput of 496.5 requests/second.

Results For NGINX

NGINX on the other hand had the average response time of 0.142s and the 90th percentile time of 0.165s. It achieved an average throughput of 26880 hits during the first test.

We see a slight bump in the response time percentiles but except that, the graph looks pretty flat. This is good as it means almost all requests took roughly the same amount of time to finish.

In the second test, Nginx was able to serve 149216 requests which resulted in a throughput of 495.7 requests/second.

Which One Is Better?

In our two tests, OpenLiteSpeed lost one round by a margin of 0.49% and won another round by a margin of 0.17%. The difference in measurements is insignificant and the fluctuations can be attributed to randomness in the environment. After analyzing the results, there is no clear winner. Enabling the FastCGI Caching on Nginx makes it just as performant as OpenLiteSpeed.

	OpenLiteSpeed	Nginx	Difference
TEST 1	26748	26880	-0.491%
TEST 2	149474	149216	0.172%

Other Factors To Consider

There are many other factors to consider besides raw performance and benchmark numbers before deciding which server to use.

1. Stability and reliability: NGINX and Apache have been around for a long time, and are known for their stability and reliability. They have a large user base and a proven track record of handling high traffic and large numbers of concurrent connections.
2. Community and support: Both NGINX and Apache have large and active communities of users and developers. This means that if you run into issues or have questions, there is a wealth of information and support available.
3. Compatibility: Both NGINX and Apache have large support for multiple web applications and frameworks, which means that they are compatible with a wide range of software, making it easy to integrate with other tools in your stack.

NGINX vs. OpenLiteSpeed vs Apache – Frequently Asked Questions

After Action Report – Finding The Best Server Stack For You

OpenLiteSpeed has a better TTFB & Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and has demonstrated a clear ability to handle a very high number of concurrent users. NGINX has been around for longer and has a more mature ecosystem but requires additional configuration to setup caching and achieve desired performance. Not enabling the cache would impact the performance severely – a difference which could equate to infrastructure savings on a large scale.

And that’s not all – there are tons of other reasons you may prefer OpenLiteSpeed over NGINX:

• Performance out of the box (very little configuration needed to get excellent results)
• Free powerful, extremely well-maintained WordPress caching plugin
• Understands Apache rewrite rules
• Lower server costs (thanks to OpenLiteSpeed’s event-driven architecture)

All in all, if you want to know for certain – our best advice is always to test for yourself! And fortunately, deploying an additional server with the help of RunCloud and cloning your existing site onto the new server is a piece of cake. Sign up for a free trial of RunCloud today.

If you have any other questions about how NGINX compares to OpenLiteSpeed and how to make your choice – feel free to leave a comment below & join the conversation.

Hosting multiple websites on a cloud server is an excellent way to save some money, especially if your sites aren’t too resource-intensive. And, if you’re on a cloud server, it’s also much easier to scale resources as needed.

If you’re managing multiple sites and wish to host them on one server, you can use Virtual Server to do this. It’s a configuration setting that allows your webserver, such as Apache, to load the site from the same server. 

In the following guide, we are going to look at how you can host multiple websites on one server using two methods: the standard configuration method (which requires some technical understanding), and how RunCloud lets you do it.

Hosting Multiple Websites on One Server by Configuring Apache

Apache lets you configure the virtual host. The conf subdirectory in Apache is what you can use to make configuration changes. 

To log into your Apache HTTP server, just connect to your server using your FTP client, and navigate to the conf subdirectory. It’s generally found in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.

Before you begin, it’s always wise to create a backup of this file. Once you have that, log into the server using an SSH client (Terminal for macOS or PuTTY for Windows).

You’ll have to enter your login credentials for the root account for the server. Now that you are in, let’s assume that you want to host two sites on the server, example1.com, and example2.com.

Before you begin, run the following command to create a root directory for both sites:

mkdir /var/www/html/example1.commkdir /var/www/html/example2.com

Next, you need to create an index.html file for both of these sites. You can do that by using the following command for each of the websites:

nano /var/www/html/example1.com/index.html

Now, add the following text:

<html><title>example1.com</title><h1>Welcome to this basic site</h1><p>This is just to show you how to host multiple sites on one server</p></html>

Do this for both of the sites (swap out the URL in the command for each), and then run the following command for both to change the ownership of their directory:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/example1.comchown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/example2.com

Now, you’ll need to create the virtual host configuration file on Apache for each of these websites. This is possible by running the following command for each:

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/example1.com.conf

You’ll also need to add the following code to create the Virtual Host:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@example1.com
ServerName example1.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/example1.com
DirectoryIndex index.htmlErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example1.com_error.logCustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example1.com_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Again, you’ll need to do this for both of your sites by swapping out the URLs and replacing them with the sites you want to host.

Once you’re done, you need to enable Virtual Host with the following command:

a2ensite example1.com
a2ensite example1.com

That’s it! You have now configured Apache to serve both sites from the same server. You can now test them by simply typing the URL for each site in your browser!

How to Host Multiple Websites on One Server Using RunCloud

RunCloud makes it easy for you to gain complete control over your server. Once you have connected RunCloud to your servers, it’s incredibly easy to host multiple websites, and you don’t even need any coding expertise.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Log into Your RunCloud Dashboard

The first step is to log into your RunCloud dashboard. When you log in, you’ll see an overview of the servers you’ve connected. Here’s how it looks:

Now, just click on the server, and you’ll see details about any running web apps, server memory, disk consumption, load, and uptime.

2. Deploy a New Web App

The next step is to deploy a new web app on your server. Simply click on the Deploy New Web App button in your dashboard, as shown below:

Now, you’ll be asked to enter the details of the app you want to launch. RunCloud supports one-click installs of WordPress and phpMyAdmin, but you can also install a script, connect a Git repository, or launch an empty web app. 

In this example, we are using WordPress.

3. Map Your Domain

Now, you’ll have to provide information associated with the web app and map a domain. 

You can choose to set up DNS records manually or use Cloudflare DNS with RunCloud. Simply enter your domain name and move to the next step, where you have to provide the admin details and add an SSL certificate.

Once you add that in, RunCloud lets you connect to a database and even choose the web application stack that you prefer. In this instance, we are going with NGINX and Apache2 Hybrid, and PHP 7.4, as shown below:

Once you’re done, just deploy the web app on your server, and it’ll appear as shown below:

That’s it! You’ve now successfully hosted multiple websites on the same server! 

After Action Report – Hosting Multiple Websites on One Server is Easy with RunCloud

RunCloud makes it incredibly easy to host multiple websites on the same server, and you don’t even need any coding expertise.

Let us know what method you use to host multiple websites on one server by commenting below, or join the conversation on Twitter by Tweeting @RunCloud_io)! 💬

WHMCS is an acronym for Web Host Manager Complete Solution, which is a common automation and billing tool that’s used by digital agencies to manage hosting solutions for their clients. This tool lets agencies set up a range of automated actions, allowing them to manage their hosting needs, automate billing, or send regular invoices.

WHMCS also lets you set up a ticketing system, and can automatically shut down a client’s account when they don’t pay, making it a suitable choice for hosting service providers.

However, while WHMCS is a popular choice, there are various alternatives available that you can use instead.

The 8 Best WHMCS Alternatives Available in 2022

In the following article, we are going to compare eight of the best WHMCS alternatives available today.

1. HostBill (Premium)

HostBill is a premium WHMCS alternative that you can use to automate large parts of your hosting business, including billing, support, and client account management.

HostBill offers support for multiple currencies, so you can expand your business globally. It also supports automated payments and lets you set up ticketing support.

One of the areas where HostBill really shines is its integrations: you can connect it to more than 500 different control panels and apps to create a custom solution that’s tailored to meet your business needs.

Since you can integrate all of these apps into one platform, you don’t have to worry about accessing multiple applications to tinker with settings. You can customize everything straight through HostBill.

HostBill lets you provision resources automatically, and it also takes care of lifecycle management, including suspensions, upgrades, or terminations as necessary. You can also define custom automation rules for specific clients.

2. RackNap (Premium)

RackNap is a subscription billing software that’s ideal for companies selling cloud hosting to their customers.

RackNap is great for taking charge of the end-to-end customer lifecycle, including setting up billing plans for customers, automating renewals, and even giving customers some element of control over their accounts by allowing them to upgrade or downgrade their connection.

You can even set up discounts or tier-based pricing for customers. RackNap lets you automate service provision from various cloud providers, including:

• Microsoft Office 365
• Acronis
• AAWS
• Microsoft Azure

It even offers dedicated dashboards for the CEO, CFO, and CTO, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and use these insights to fuel business growth.

And, like other WHMCS alternatives on this list, RackNap integrates seamlessly with popular third-party apps and payment gateways, so you can easily charge your clients and keep things running efficiently.

3. Blesta (Open Source, Premium)

Blesta is a popular billing platform designed for hosting providers that offer an excellent array of features, making it a suitable choice for those who want a reliable alternative to WHMCS.

A significant chunk of Blesta’s source code is available for everyone, making it partially open-source. However, the company does keep three files encoded, which means you’ll need to purchase a license if you want to use Blesta.

Blesta is relatively popular and integrates seamlessly with different tools like cPanel, 2Checkout, and others. The company also has a dedicated team of developers who regularly check the source code for bugs or security flaws.

Blesta lets you create client pages to allow for self-management, making it easy for them to review their billing and invoices or upgrade or downgrade their connections.

More importantly, Blesta also has a dedicated ticketing system, allowing your customers to open support tickets.

The interface is clean and very user-friendly, allowing you to see what services each client is using, how much they are paying, any open tickets, and other relevant information about their subscription.

Blesta even lets you create a knowledge base, so you can develop guides for your clients to follow, which no doubt helps improve customer satisfaction.

The platform supports multiple currencies, and you can even add credits to each customer’s account if required. Since it integrates with all major payment gateways, it’s quite easy to accept payments via credit cards. It also lets you offer coupon codes to customers for discounts.

Blesta offers a 30-day free trial and an online demo. On top of that, it even provides multi-company support for users that are running several hosting companies.

4. Clientexec (Premium)

Clientexec is a great WHMCS alternative for businesses that are looking to introduce automation into their workflows. It works seamlessly with different plugins and domain registrars, payment processors, and third-party hosting providers, allowing you to customize it however you prefer.

Clientexec offers a range of services to companies, including client account management, invoice automation, and billing integrations. It also supports automated provisioning for popular domain registrars like OpenSRS, NameCheap, and NameSilo, making it incredibly easy to set up.

Since it integrates seamlessly with different payment gateways, you can easily expand your customer base worldwide too. The platform features basic invoicing and reporting, so you’ll have all the information you need about business performance, including taxes, reminders, subscription payments, and discounts.

It’s also great for boosting your support quality, as Clientexec comes with a knowledge base, ticketing system, email, and live chat support, all built-in.

One of the best things about Clientexec is its reporting capabilities. From tracking your revenues to new clients or even tracking how your KB articles help clients, Clientexec makes it easy for you to gauge exactly how your business is performing.

5. WISECP

WISECP is a direct competitor to WHMCS and offers excellent value for the price you pay. Their hosting automation platform offers various services for free that you’d have to pay for with WHMCS, including:

• Client blacklisting
• Browser, IP, or location-based authentication
• Blocking VPN or proxy users
• Protection against brute force attacks

WISECP makes it easy for businesses to sell custom hosting plans and even integrates with domain registrars, so you can also offer domain names through your platform. It supports automatic invoicing and lets you accept payments by integrating with all major payment gateways.

WISECP also offers support for tax systems in different countries, including EU taxation. There’s a ticketing system with AJAX support, letting you view replies from clients in real time, so you don’t have to refresh the page each time.

You can also create canned responses, assign tickets to different team members, add notes to each ticket, and change their status accordingly. The platform is very developer-friendly and supports various third-party control panels and plugins.

6. BillingServ (Premium)

If you need an excellent hosting automation platform that’s focused on improving your client billing and subscription process, BillingServ is a great choice.

Like all other WHMCS alternatives on this list, BillingServ works seamlessly with major payment gateways and control panels. It lets you create automated payment reminders, automate client accounts, and offers extensive reporting features.

It’s a fully cloud-based solution, so you don’t have to worry about hosting or installing anything. Customer management is easy, allowing you to set up ticketing support or email support.

It also comes with DDoS protection built-in and integrates with major control panels like Plesk or cPanel. You can also integrate it with any SSL provider or domain registrar.

If you’re looking for a highly scalable solution for your hosting business, BillingServ has everything that you’ll require. The team behind BillingServ is highly dedicated, and they regularly release security updates and patches.

7. Ubersmith (Premium)

Ubersmith markets itself toward larger hosting providers, especially companies that offer cloud hosting. This is different from WHMCS, which mainly targets small to medium-sized businesses.

However, if you need an automated billing solution to manage your client’s accounts, Ubersmith is a great choice. It lets you create custom quotes and track reports and has a built-in ticketing system that lets you improve customer support too.

Self-management options are available, where you can create an account for each client, letting them track their invoices and account history, and even see any support tickets that they’ve opened in the past.

Ubersmith integrates with all major domain registrars, and you can easily pair it with any of the popular payment gateways to accept payments in multiple currencies.

8. RunCloud (Premium)

RunCloud (hey, that’s us!) is designed to make managing your server infrastructure incredibly easy. While, at this time, we may not have all the features offered elsewhere, such as billing clients and setting resource limitations – many of our customers use RunCloud to handle the deployment & manage the entire process (with some manual input). 

RunCloud works seamlessly with any cloud provider, letting you connect your servers, review performance and server health, and host sites. If you’re running a web hosting company and need an excellent server management platform, RunCloud is a solid choice.

It offers team management, on-demand backups, instantaneous deployment, and a dashboard that’s been meticulously designed to improve performance and give you the information you need to make key decisions.

After Action Report – Use RunCloud with a WHMCS Alternative to Sell Web Hosting

You can use any of these WHMCS alternatives with RunCloud, which allows you to optimize server management without requiring any kind of command-line experience. You can reduce your server configuration times and offer a better standard of service to your customers!

Already using any of these WHMCS alternatives with RunCloud? Or, have any queries? Let us know, and join the conversation by commenting below! 💬

DigitalOcean is a cloud IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) provider that offers affordable cloud hosting solutions. It uses Droplets, which are essentially Linux-based VMs (virtual machines) that are layered atop virtualized hardware.

Think of each Droplet as a new server, which can work discretely, or as part of a larger infrastructure. Creating backups on DigitalOcean is very important to secure your data, and the company refers to each backup as a “snapshot”.

In this article, we’re going to talk about how long each DigitalOcean snapshot takes.

What are Snapshots?

DigitalOcean refers to snapshots as on-demand backups or disk images of Droplets and all associated volumes that are saved to your account. You can use these to replicate new volumes or create a new Droplet using similar content, and there’s no limit to the number of snapshots you can take.

How Long Does Each DigitalOcean Snapshot Take?

In general, each DigitalOcean snapshot takes between one and three minutes for each GB of disk space used on the Droplet. To put this into perspective, a Droplet that uses 5 GB of disk space will take between 5-15 minutes.

Therefore, the more disk space your server uses, the longer each snapshot’s going to take. Ideally, you’ll want to make sure that you regularly back up your Droplets. You can create snapshots from the control panel or with the API, and they become available for viewing immediately.

Keep in mind that there are going to be some instances where the snapshots may take longer, primarily depending on the volume of data, the disk space, and the load on each server. For instance, if the write load on your server is high, the Snapshots will take longer.

If you’re using RunCloud, you can back up your data pertaining to all web applications and databases (for further information about this, read our article on how to properly back up your website for disaster recovery).

You can also automate DigitalOcean Droplet snapshots using SimpleBackups, a third-party tool that creates backups and automates Droplet and Volume snapshots.

After Action Report — Backing Up Your Servers is Critically Important

The last thing you want is to lose any important data due to an oversight. That’s the reason why DigitalOcean snapshots can make it easy for you to back up your Droplets and volumes.

And if you have any important files, you can easily replicate them by creating additional Droplets.Are you backing up your servers frequently? Let us know the frequency you prefer, and any tips you think are essential in managing disaster recovery effectively by joining in the conversation in the comments (or by Tweeting @RunCloud_io). 💬