@komi,

Here’s a high-level opinion:

OpenLiteSpeed WordPress for:

• If you are looking for page speed/high traffic solution
• Page score can also be improved
• Object Cache pre-config

Wordpress regular pack for:

• Full .htaccess file support
• Pre-config fail2ban service

Best,
Eric

If you have a simple site with a moderate database size ( < 100MB) and no performance killing plugins installed and a good performant theme, than you can go with a default WP one-click app, which should cause less troubles. But if you have a huge database - than you should consider the litespeed app. It has phenomenally improved the performance of one of my sites with a database size of 4GB. The server response time for the page with the worst loading time with a total of 5.2 seconds has dropped without any caching to 2.3 seconds. The server response time for the HTML file has dropped from 2.5s to 140ms!!! The download of the HTML file for the same page has dropped from 1.2s to 650ms. And after enabling the preinstalled litespeed cache the DOMContentLoaded time has dropped by factor 20 for the same page - from 3.5s to 180ms. The rest of the load time is still quite high due browser rendering time of the relatively big vue.js app (500kb) and therefore a delayed images request and load.

Both droplets had 8GB RAM and 4 CPU’s. The none-litespeed droplet had a manually (well) configured Nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL setup. Both innodbbufferpool_size’s I have set to 6GB.

The only drawback for me is that I have now to learn a lot of new stuff and some stuff isn’t working out of the box in my case like Openlitespeed admin panel, rest api requests when caching plugin is enabled (without the plugin rest api requests work just fine). Also everything is now in a new place on the server (logs, configs). I also had to add a new PATH for the “php” command. So there is a lot of work to do. I also loved Nginx’s php-fpm socket separation per linux user. With openlitespeed I don’t know if there is such a features. But now I just will use Docker, wich is even better for a secure app separation.

Ok, I’ve found out now that OpenLiteSpeed’s great performance is based mainly on the built-in LiteSpeed Cache module. You can achieve similar results using Nginx + FastCGI caching. But OpenLitesSpeed has still an advantage over Nginx: there are no pre configured apps/setups for WordPress using Nginx and FastCGI. It seems to be a huge pain in the as* to achieve same results as using the DigitalOcean’s pre built Openlitespeed droplet. Also there are currently no plugins available to purge automatically the FastCGI cache, which can keep up with the functionality of the LiteSpeed Cache WordPress Plugin offers.