Best Lighttpd Web Hosting
Lighttpd Brief Introduction
Lighttpd (pronounced "lighty") is an open-source web server and designed to power the delivery of web content to small and large sites alike. With enhanced support for implementing scalabe FastCGI web applications, this web server has enjoyed increasing popularity with organizations focused on delivering dynamic content with less overhead than traditionally deployed solutions like Apache.
Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility — all of these describe lighttpd which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver. Lighthttpd is perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems.
Since lighthttpd is the perfect alternative option for Apache and compatible with all apache configurations. Many popular websites are powered by lighthttpd for heavy traffic solutions. Websites such as youtube, wikipedia are lighthttpd powered.
Best Lighttpd Web Hosting
Since lighthttpd is rarely deployed to hosting environment, mostly you have to configure it by yourself on vps or dedicated server. For lighthttpd hosting, what you're really looking for is a reliable vps or dedicated server provider. For vps solutions we highly recommend hostgator and greengeeks. they both offer affordable and reliable vps solutions.
However, instead dealing with something you're not familiar with, we don't recommend having lighttped installed on your production server unless you're very professional in managing all the services. There's not yet a popular control panel support over this web server. Most tasks have to be managed through ssh communication.
On the other hand, there're lots of lightweight web server solutions like litespeed, nginx etc which is working perfect on many servers. Most of them can be added to cpanel control panel directly via installer or few ssh commands.
Lighttpd vs Apache vs Nginx
From this nginx hosting page, we have discussed that nginx is the best choice for single heavy traffic websites on a vps or dedicated server. Apache is widely used for almost 99% web hosting providers for it's stableness, but how about lighthttpd? To understand more, we have make few tests on our own server, here're few points.
Test with the default configurations, all the three web servers have no real difference under 500 concurrent connections and performed perfectly.
When concurrent connections reach to about 1000, lighthttpd catched about 99% errors while nginx is 100%!
Apache is stable solution for web hosting solutions, optimized nginx and lighttpd is good for vps and dedicated server.
If you're going to offer web hosting service to people, we highly suggest the popular choice other than giving yourself challenges. If you need fast and stable web server solutions, apache is reliable choice after many years' production installation. If you need faster speed, you can also consider litespeed which is recognized 10 times faster than apache and fully compatible with apache configuration rules!
