In this post, we won’t mention reputation or technical support, but we will talk exclusively about server configuration, specifically the web server most used by hosting companies.
ApacheApache is the most popular web server and the cheapest shared hosting offers are found at Apache.
It is not the most popular because it is the best but it is the oldest, it is free (open source) and it is installed by default with cPanel.
The Apache problem occurs in situations of high traffic, not very scalable, increasingly consuming more resources and eventually blocking the entire server.
That’s why when your site gets more traffic, you’ll get a message from the hosting provider telling you to stop your current hosting and upgrade to a VPS.
The problem is the construction of Apache, how it manages the connections (based on processes). Apache creates a new process/thread for each connection. And each process consumes memory and CPU, so if you are more, performance suffers.
One solution would be a reverse proxy in front of Apache (nginx or varnish) to serve static elements (images, css, js, html) and Apache to only reach requests in php. Therefore, it consumes fewer resources and the server can support more traffic.
Very few hosting companies do this because: It increases the complexity of the configuration. If all goes well, everyone has the smallest hosting package and doesn’t upgrade.
LiteSpeedLiteSpeed web host is probably the best for your shared hosting. It is 50% faster than Apache PHP script processing and offers up to 600% faster static elements. It consumes less resources than Apache, it can handle more traffic, DDOS protection is built in, and it can do absolutely everything that makes Apache better.
From my point of view, the best solution for your shared hosting is a stack with CloudLinux OS instead of CentOS and LiteSpeed web server instead of Apache.
CloudLinux is fully sandboxed so that clients don’t get any site consuming too much resources and crashing, and LiteSpeed server provides better performance and scalability.
LiteSpeed ​​unlike Apache, but not process-based, i.e. event-driven connections serving fewer processes, saving resources. It’s a more efficient way of managing connections, and that means you can handle more traffic with fewer resources.
This setup has only one problem, it is not free like CentOS + Apache. CloudLinux costs money, and LiteSpeed costs money and puts a high price tag on hosting packages.
But the advantages are clear: you have stability, performance and scalability.
NginxNginx can be used as a standalone web server, not just a reverse proxy against Apache. I don’t know how to do a lot of things like Apache but the ones you know are 50 times faster.
Nginx does not have a built-in PHP mode, so it must communicate with a separate PHP-FPM server, namely PHP5.
PHP5-FPM supports “adaptive process flooding” which means site with low traffic will move super fast and in case of massive traffic it will slow down without blocking.
Nginx is very scalable (event-driven), can support thousands of concurrent connections (this is the purpose it was invented for), and resource consumption is very small (and very predictable).
The Nginx/PHP5-FPM setup cannot be used on shared hosting, but it is by far the best solution for a low memory VPS.
Set up Nginx Sites using high traffic sites: Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, WordPress, Intel, CNN and other big websites.
The problem with Nginx is that it doesn’t support .htaccess and few control panels support it.
From my point of view these are not big problems, you can write and rewrite sites that do the same thing you do with access rules and control panel can be foregone as long as your goal is performance and not playing through cPanel .
These are the most popular web servers used by hosting companies, so if you want to choose a hosting solution for your site, these are: A cheap shared hosting solution, if you want it, is a company that has a standard setup with Apache CentOS + If you want stability and performance without paying a lot of money for a VPS when the recommendation is to use LiteSpeed + CloudLinux company if you want a VPS with ultra performance Nginx is the best option
Above only my points, everything depends on you. What servers do you want to have for your web hosting?