Announcing the Release of OpenLiteSpeed

We are very happy to announce the release of OpenLiteSpeed 1.0, a new, open source version of LiteSpeed Web Server. That’s right: LiteSpeed is going open source. We believe that giving the open source community more web serving options can’t be a bad thing, and that OpenLiteSpeed can add speed, functionality, and ease of use to the arena of open source http servers.

OpenLiteSpeed contains much of the same functionality available in our Enterprise Edition:

• lightweight
• great speed
• efficient use of external applications
• Apache-compatible rewrite rules
• graceful restart
• scalability
• lots of security features
• real-time stats
• an easy-to-use GUI

Some features, though, are reserved for our Enterprise Edition customers:

• control panel compatibility
• .htaccess compatibility
• mod_security compatibility
• page caching.

Our press release is included below. Details and downloads can be found on the new OpenLiteSpeed site. If you have questions or want to get involved, please join the OpenLiteSpeed Development Group on Google Groups. Next week we plan to come back with another post about reactions (both positive and negative) to OpenLiteSpeed. We hope that those of you looking for a free, open source option will find OpenLiteSpeed meets your needs. And we hope that this larger community will benefit both open source and Enterprise users.

Welcome to LiteSpeed.

Press Release

LiteSpeed Announces the Release of OpenLiteSpeed 1.0

World’s Fastest Web Server Joins the Open Source Community

Basking Ridge, New Jersey — May 2, 2013

LiteSpeed Technologies announced today that it has joined the open source community with the release of OpenLiteSpeed 1.0. LiteSpeed Web Server has long been the 4th most popular HTTP server and the 2nd most popular commercial server on the web. We want to continue to expand the options open to users, allowing more people to experience our high-speed, lightweight web server.

OpenLiteSpeed 1.0 can be downloaded at: http://open.litespeedtech.com.

Features

Most of LiteSpeed Web Server’s features have been preserved in OpenLiteSpeed.

• LiteSpeed’s high-performance, event-driven architecture means extremely fast HTTP service, with a tiny memory footprint. (That is why the company is called “Lite” “Speed.”)
• LiteSpeed’s WebAdmin GUI provides real time stats and greatly lowers the barrier to web server administration.
• OpenLiteSpeed carries many of LiteSpeed’s security features, including bandwidth and connection throttling and external application suEXEC mode.
• LiteSpeed delegates external application processes to separate external applications instead of running them in the server’s processes like an Apache module. This makes for efficient response to multiple connections.
• LiteSpeed’s native SAPI for PHP and Ruby allows external applications written in these languages to run up to 50% faster.
• OpenLiteSpeed allows worker processes in order to scale to multiple processors.
• The graceful restart feature applies LiteSpeed configuration changes and upgrades with no downtime.
• Apache compatible rewrite rules mean you don’t have to learn a new language.
• OpenLiteSpeed is the first LiteSpeed version to allow flat file configurations.

Still Commercial?

Yes. We are adhering to a commercial open source model. Following the practice of other commercial open source developers, we are preserving some features as only available in our commercial products. We hope that this will benefit both open source and commercial users. Open source users get a free, fast, customizable LiteSpeed. Commercial users benefit from a larger LiteSpeed community and features only available in the commercial editions. Hosting control panel compatibility, mod_security compatibility, .htaccess file compatibility, and page caching will remain commercial-only.

At LiteSpeed, we believe the heart of a software company should be a great product. Our company is mostly development staff. Commercial editions support this development team. They allow us to keep our company self-sufficient, self-directed, and concentrated on making our product better.

Finally, we would like to say thank you to all our current users. You are the core of our community. We hope that, together, we can build an even more inclusive and helpful LiteSpeed community.

Make the jump to LiteSpeed.