Fresh Roasted Hosting Makes the Jump to LiteSpeed!

posted by Farhan Mirajkar on February 9, 2014

You’ve probably already caught the news from our Facebook feed by now, but we wanted to make it official:  As of February 9 2014, all Fresh Roasted Hosting webserver nodes have been upgraded to LiteSpeed!  This is a free upgrade for all of our existing customers, and directly replaces our previous Apache / Varnish / nginx combinations.

For those of you who don’t know, LiteSpeed is a high-performance webserver.  That’s the piece of software that sits on the server and hands out copies of your website.  Until now, we’ve used Apache — a very stable and widely-used webserver.  Apache was revolutionary when it came out nearly 20 years ago.  But just as technology has evolved over the years, so has the way we use our websites.

Long gone are the days of dialing into your ISP, loading a website, and watching static content scroll by.  Today’s websites are responsive, dynamically-generated mountains of content that require a faster, more robust back end infrastructure.  LiteSpeed is as much as 533% faster than Apache and as much as 67% faster than nginx.  That means your pages load faster and more smoothly, which keeps your customers happy and your site visitors coming back.

Just to recap, here’s what makes Fresh Roasted Hosting one of the fastest web hosts you’ll ever encounter:

  1. Bandwidth:  We use a blend of Tier 1 providers including CenturyLink, Zayo, TeliaSonera, and Cogent.  This means that if one provider goes down or has a slow route to your visitor, traffic gets instantly routed to an optimal route.  Single-carrier hosts can’t offer this level of protection.
  2. Network:  Two Cisco border routers, two Cisco core routers, and redundant links to each switch.  That means that a single hardware failure won’t bring everything crashing down.
  3. Location:  Our web hosting servers are racked in the former Federal Reserve building at 400 S Akard Street in downtown Dallas, Texas.  12 utility power feeds with N+2 transformers, a dozen large-scale UPS systems, ten disel generators, and N+1 HVAC capacity — can you say resilient?  All the speed in the world doesn’t matter if your server keeps going down.
  4. SSD Acceleration:  Databases can be some of the most disk-intensive operations a website will perform.  That’s why we use Samsung 840 SSD drives and MySQL performance optimizations to handle all database transactions.
  5. LiteSpeed:  Fast, stable, and reliable.  LiteSpeed is better able to handle the highs and demands of everyday web traffic.  Not only is LiteSpeed faster, but because the server spends less time serving up websites, it has more resources available to dedicate to tasks like database operations and server-side scripts.

If you think we were fast before, or if you think your current host is even faster, just wait until you see what our accelerated hosting platform does now!

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