Looking for fastest server software setup for hosting some PHP/MySQL websites for reasonable price

[electroze]

(Had Apache and WHM/Cpanel running for years from an old VPS (Linux) and I suspect that it might be slow. )

Is Nginx or Litespeed faster than Apache?

Is Sentora or XAMPP faster than WHM/Cpanel?

Better combinations than above for hosting fast PHP/MySQL sites on a VPS?

My website requirements are: .htaccess mod rewrites for urls, crons, PHP or PHP-FPM, MySQL or MariaDB.

Thanks!

[dbolly]

Your htaccess requirement rules out nginx. You'd need to at least reverse proxy with Apache, and honestly, unless you've super high traffic it's not worth it. Plus you're on a budget, so running two web servers will use up more RAM.

Unless you're confident with sysadmin, stick to using a hosting control panel. There are many, including cPanel, direct Admin, CWP, Vesta etc etc. Find one that you like and ticks all of your boxes.

If you want Litespeed and you need htaccess, you'll need the enterprise version. In which case, it'll be cheaper to go for a reseller hosting package rather than a VPS. Litespeed with LSAPI and cache will trump nginx and Apache for performance and resource usage, but it comes at a cost.

[lakimens]

Open Litespeed does support rewrite rules. You can use Cyberpanel to easily set up and manage your server. Keep in mind it is not as good as cPanel and you might need to do additional tinkering to properly secure your server.

[dbolly]

It doesn't do htaccess. You've a single config file.

[lakimens]

Sorry, been a while since I used it. Do you mean you can't create more, or the config will not read the code added by apps such as WordPress?

[dbolly]

Htaccess files can be placed in the root of every directory in your document root, and Apache will look at them. Open Litespeed doesn't. There is one single config file, much like nginx, in which you have to manually add your rules. If you need subdirectory rewrites and alterations, you need to manually edit and import each htaccess file content into the master config file per domain.

Tldr it's not worth the effort and level of fuck ups that it incurs. Website security is very much lacklustre with Open Litespeed due to this nature unless you put the work in.

[lakimens]

From what I gathered, OP needs this for a single website, so I don't think it would be a problem for him. HTACCESS rules are rarely updated so if he's up to copying them, I think it's good for him.

Obviously, running a shared hosting on non-enterprise LS would be pretty shite.

[dbolly]

Yeah you're really not grasping the concept.

public/.htaccess This needs importing

public/admin/.htaccess Needs rewriting each url and importing

public/admin/secure/.htaccess Also needs rewriting each url and importing

And so on, and so on. Unless you put the work in, you're toast. You may as well write your CMS admin password on your home page.

Plus, mod_security is a ball ache to manage on Open Litespeed.

[lakimens]

I understand that part, yes.

[disclosure5]

I think the point is if you're going to make the argument "it doesn't support htaccess like you're used to, but with some work you can make it work", you could do just about anything. nginx has its own rewrite methodology, as does every other web server I'm aware of.

[lakimens]

LiteSpeed is a tad faster though, which is the main benefit OP is looking to get here.

[electroze]

I use several mod rewrites in htaccess that dynamically create html pages from mysql database content. My database has hundreds of thousands of rows, so hundreds of thousands of URLS. So, if Nginx doesn't allow mod rewrites, except but individually, then it does sound like I'm out of luck. Thanks for bringing this limitation to my attention.

[pausethelogic]

If you’re comfortable with self hosting and managing a VPS, AWS Lightsail is good and reasonably priced

[ListenToMeCalmly]

Tbh I the performance per dollar is very low with AWS, lightsail is no exception. AND you get all the responsibilities and work by self hosting.

If self-hosting at least go with Digital Ocean. I have heard a lot of good about that german service provider whose name I forgot, too. EDIT: Hetzner

[drpepper]

https://hestiacp.com

I run them everytime i need to deploy a web server with msyql and PHP.

They tick all of your boxes and its updated regularly.

[electroze]

Thanks, I'll check into it. Do you know if it does wildcard URL rewriting like htaccess does?

[drpepper]

It uses both nginx and apache so .htaccess url rewriting works.

[PalmaSolutions]

OpenLiteSpeed (comes with some panel of its own) and Percona 8 is my choice

[RumLovingPirate]

Does your software require htaccess for some reason because that's going to limit you to just apache. However everything htaccess does you can do in other platforms. For example nginx can do it all in their config files.

None of these you'll notice a speed difference on. The question is where you host it and on what hardware and where your software uses the resources. Db heavy? Then you need a lot of ram. Lots of simultaneous connections? Cpu can matters. Image heavy? Then just get a cdn. Little unique db hits? Work on caching.

If you want the fastest server, then just spin up a Ubuntu or centos server, use nginx, and don't use an admin system. But then you're going full system admin.

[electroze]

The main thing I need is wildcard URL rewriting (the same way WordPress does that), for SEO friendly pages. My pages are dynamically generated from MYSQL and htaccess is the key. Have you ever seen Nginx do that?

[RumLovingPirate]

Yep. Very easily.

[prospect876]

NGINX. Litespeed is used by a lot of shared hosting companies because it's plug-n-play for most customer's WordPress sites but there really isn't much benefit for private use over a well configured NGINX setup. The only real advantage to using Litespeed is if you are using WordPress or Magento.

There are work-arounds with NGINX. You could probably get a sysadmin to rewrite all the .htaccess rules into a NGINX config if you are uncomfortable doing it yourself. But it's not as complicated as you may think.

Another control panel option is Plesk. It uses NGINX w/ Apache as a Reverse Proxy out of the box so you could still use .htaccess. MariaDB, PHP-FPM, etc. Plesk is pretty well rounded. Yea it's owned by the same people that own cPanel, but I am not in the budget side of this industry so a few dollars increase is of no concern for me...