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Today I've seen on the wordpress requirements that they recommend Apache or litespeed web server. It's the first time I've heard about litespeed and I've been hearing Apache for years.

What are the differences? What are the advantages of litespeed over apache? Any experience on both?

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I use LiteSpeed as my primary webserver. It more or less replaces Apache in most functionality (including rewrites and bytelogging), will drop directly in with CPanel/WHM. It has an extensive featureset really designed for performance and scalability (and DDoS mitigation). The web interface is nice versus digging through configuration files. My favorite feature is the PHP SAPI module they provide which increases PHP performance. I really find LiteSpeed to be a refreshing change from Apache and gives me only the functionality I need to host my personal sites. There is a downside however, Litespeed costs money. The standard version is free (which is what I use), but it caps max concurrent connections. One of my sites is active with hundreds of simultaneous users and I never run into concurrency problems.

I would say LiteSpeed's strength lies in static fileserving and dynamic content with either Python, PHP, or Ruby (especially Ruby on Rails). In older benchmarks it performs better which in my experience is true, but at the same time tuning Apache can get close to similar results, but the LSAPI module is pretty unique (similar to fast-cgi) and works well. The main developer is really attentive and implemented a few things I needed in LiteSpeed.

I'd say give it a try. It can import your existing Apache configuration and run on an offset port and is free unless you need the Enterprise edition.

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Good answer. Or shorter, Litespeed is an event-driven async I/O server with a few threads / processes; which means it is faster than Apache and consumes less RAM/CPU than Apache. It is a commercial product, with a nice web-GUI for most administration tasks. It cannot do everything that Apache can, see the Litespeedtech site for details. – Jesper Mortensen Oct 12 '09 at 22:30
In addition, one of the reasons Wordpress recommends it is they moved their blog hosting service from Apache to LiteSpeed and was able to scale their service beyond what they normally would have been able to. I believe they're still on LiteSpeed. – Xorlev Oct 13 '09 at 3:58
@Xorlev: I didn't know that Wordpress.com uses LiteSpeed ... it seems a bit odd, since they're also using nginx, and nginx / LiteSpeed have a more or less overlapping feature set. barry.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/load-balancer-update – Jesper Mortensen Oct 29 '09 at 23:43
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Also, lighttpd is another good option for a webserver that acts like Apache.

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lighttpd is totally different, and doesn't 'act' like apache at all. configuration files are different, it doesn't use nor recommend htaccess. LiteSpeed on the other hand, can run without u change anything on Apache configuration. – Devrim Feb 25 '10 at 21:42
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Looks like WordPress.com is using varnishd, pound, Amazon S3, and an unnamed 'http daemon' : http://blog.apokalyptik.com/2007/10/10/so-you-wanna-see-an-image/

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