cPanel Support: The Official Position

Update: cPanel now officially supports LiteSpeed Web Server!

We have a lot of users using cPanel, and sometimes cPanel support for LSWS users can be something of a thorny issue. Some users have gotten the impression that cPanel will not support them just because they use LiteSpeed. cPanel and LiteSpeed want to assure you that this is not the case. I spoke with Brian Oates, cPanel’s Technical Support Manager, recently about how a support ticket should go: To be clear, the only web server supported and sanctioned by cPanel is Apache built through EasyApache. Brian stressed, though, that that does not mean that they will not try to help customers using other web servers. They will do everything they can to help cPanel users facing problems, and if your issue is not related to the web server, the topic of LiteSpeed shouldn’t even come up. If, however, the web server seems to be the problem, Brian says there’s a two step process:

1. Check the usual suspects (httpd.conf, /var/cpanel/userdata/, etc.)
2. Request the user temporarily revert back to Apache.

Brian emphasized that they understand that most configurations are the same for LSWS and Apache, so they’ll first try to track down the issue in Apache’s configs. Brian also stressed that, if you have to switch back to Apache, it will only be for a very quick test. Once cPanel can confirm that that the problem exists with Apache as well, they’ll let you switch back to LSWS. cPanel has made it very clear that they view most problems as their responsibility: “If the problem is unrelated to Litespeed and is an issue with cPanel & WHM, we should be chasing that down and solving it,” Brian said. Very occasionally, users may have to switch to Apache a couple of times to re-test, but Brian says this happens in only a small minority of cases, and cPanel will do their best to find the cause of most problems.

Now, some users, when I told them about this, balked at the idea of switching to Apache. “The box will explode!” one yelled. Most users, though, should be fine making a quick switch to Apache. (A quick test hopefully won’t cause enough load to trigger an explosion. And, it should be noted, switching to Apache is usually our first step in trouble-shooting, too.) If, for some reason, you absolutely can’t switch to Apache, then come to our forum or report a bug to our bug report box. We’re working with cPanel and hope some day to achieve the level of integration required for cPanel to support LiteSpeed. For now, though, cPanel handles what they can. We’ll take care of the rest.