Why We Don’t Offer OpenLiteSpeed

At SpinupWP, we aim to provide a fast, reliable, and developer-friendly platform for managing WordPress servers. That means making careful decisions about the technologies we support, decisions that balance performance, ease of use, and long-term maintainability. One of the common questions we receive is why we don’t support OpenLiteSpeed (OLS).

The answer comes down to three factors: performance realities, long-term maintainability, and the trade-offs that come with supporting multiple web servers.

Performance: Not Significant Enough

There’s no doubt that LiteSpeed, and its open-source counterpart OpenLiteSpeed, are capable and well-engineered web servers. Its architecture is solid, and its caching system works well. But when you compare OpenLiteSpeed to Nginx in practical scenarios, the performance gap that would justify supporting a second web server is just not significant enough.

Independent benchmarks show that while OpenLiteSpeed performs competitively, Nginx (if fined-tuned properly) consistently leads under high-traffic stress conditions and maintains lower response times under heavy concurrency. These results align with our own experiences and what we see across the broader web hosting industry.

As such, Nginx remains as one of the fastest, most stable, and most battle-tested web servers available. For WordPress workloads, especially within the caching strategies SpinupWP is designed around, its performance is exceptional.

When reviewing benchmarks between both solutions, it’s important to note whether they were both fine-tuned beforehand. This is especially critical when benchmarking Nginx, as its default configuration does not provide good performance out-of-the-box. OpenLiteSpeed is the better out-of-the-box solution. But this doesn’t tell the whole story.

Maintainability: Added Complexity and Development Overhead

Supporting an additional web server doesn’t just mean “install it and ship it.” Doing so would meaningfully change SpinupWP’s entire engineering and support workflow.

It’s also worth noting that we already bear some of this complexity today, even while supporting a single web server.

Development Overhead

Every feature in SpinupWP that interacts with the web server (site creation, redirects, SSL, caching, rewrites, security headers, logging, performance tuning, etc.) would need special handling for OpenLiteSpeed.

Even within Nginx alone, we already have to account for behavioral and syntax differences between versions. A good example is the recent http2 directive change, where differences between Nginx versions required additional logic, testing, and safeguards to ensure sites continued to work correctly across supported environments.

With OpenLiteSpeed added to the mix, every new feature becomes significantly more time-consuming:

  • More configuration variations
  • More OS-level behavior differences
  • More potential conflicts
  • More testing

Twice the web servers means twice the testing, twice the edge cases, twice the debugging.

As you might imagine, this significantly slows down development across the entire product.

Technical Support Overhead

The technical support burden would also grow considerably. OpenLiteSpeed’s configuration model differs from Nginx, which means:

  • More documentation
  • More support tickets
  • More troubleshooting scenarios
  • More opportunities for user misconfiguration

And just as with development, this wouldn’t replace existing complexity. It would just be layered on top of the version-specific differences we already support within Nginx itself.

All of this pulls time and focus away from improving the platform as a whole.

Staying Focused

We believe a great product isn’t one that tries to support every possible technology, but rather one that delivers a streamlined, predictable, and high-quality user experience. OpenLiteSpeed is a solid piece of technology, and we understand why some users prefer it. However, after considering the performance data, ecosystem maturity, maintenance costs, and long-term impact on SpinupWP’s roadmap, the decision is clear.

By focusing on a single web server, we’re able to reduce complexity across the platform, which directly translates into fewer bugs, more predictable behavior, and a more stable experience for our users. When there’s only one core web server to account for, changes are easier to reason about, easier to test, and far less likely to introduce subtle edge cases.

Supporting OpenLiteSpeed would add significant complexity and slow down our ability to deliver the features and updates our users value, all without providing a significant performance benefit over Nginx. Therefore, our focus remains on offering the simplest, fastest, and most reliable WordPress server management platform possible, and Nginx continues to be the best fit for that mission.