Litespeed server technology

We are proud to announce that our hosting platform has been upgraded to Litespeed this year.

Litespeed with LiteSpeed cache plugin couples very nicely with CloudFlare to give impressive results.

We’ve seen the majority of our sites gaining around 2 seconds of load time pretty much immediately after enabling. That means many of our client sites are now loading between 1.5 to 2.5 seconds.

We tested this configuration against AWS CloudFront but we did not see any significant improvement when using CloudFront, instead you add a paid service which is much harder to synchronize with typical CMS platforms like WordPress and Drupal.

Below is a list of the configuration sequence we employ in order to maximize the Litespeed+CloudFlare integration:

Connect Litespeed cache plugin to the API of CloudFlare by supplying the Global key, this is under advanced settings of Litespeed
Enable HTTPS switching on CloudFlare to keep CloudFlare doing the heavy lifting (we like to run all our sites in HTTPS for speed and performance)
Enable Litespeed page crawler
Ensure CRON is running daily, possibly by setting up a system-level CRON and not relying on the CMS-based CRON
Enable minification of CSS and JS, plus also JS acceleration on CloudFlare
Run the lightflare image optimization batcher manually so it can start to learn and automate the process
Ensure minimum cache times are to your liking, we adjust these according to expected site volumes and the level of maintenance and skill levels of our site admins
Determine if private caching should exclude specific resources
Determine what pages are purged when a new update is made

Put this all together, and you get some really fast web test results. Here are test results from several of our sites:

Before: