HTTP/2 & More Now Available at Hawk Host via Litespeed 5.0

Posted By: Tony Baird

Last Updated: Monday July 13, 2015

We’re proud to announce it is now official we’re running Litespeed 5 on all our servers and will not be going back to an older version of the software. We’ve been testing 5.0 before its release and upon its official stable release we had started our roll out to a larger amount of our users. We spent nearly a month working with the Litespeed team as we uncovered bugs in our environment and they quickly fixed them. We’re now confident that Litespeed 5 is here to stay at Hawk Host and it’s time for all our users to know so they can take advantage of the many new features.

HTTP/2

Litespeed was one of the first web servers to support HTTP 2. Apache, the most popular web server on the internet, supports HTTP 2 only through the module mod_h2. Nginx, another high performance web server, does not expect HTTP/2 support until the end of 2015. HTTP/2 has many advantages:

Better header compression using HPACK
Faster page load speeds
Stronger data encryption requirements
Multiplexing requests with priority
Reduced network latency
Common browsers already support HTTP/2

In layman’s terms this means a faster more secure web site. There are absolutely no negatives in having your website allow HTTP/2 connections for the users who have browsers that support it.

LiteMage

If you’re running a store that utilizes the Magento software you’ve no doubt encountered how slow the software can be. Unfortunately there are no ways to cache pages like you would with software like Wordpress. LiteMage utilizes Litespeed 5s ability to do edge side includes, which is a markup language that allows you to designate parts of your dynamic page as separate fragments that are then assembled together to make a whole web page. This results in the following:

Partial caching of Magento pages
Preliminary testing has shown the LiteMage cache is 15-20x faster than Varnish based caching solutions

That is just a few of the great features added to Litespeed 5. In addition, there are a number of security and performance improvements added to the software. If you’re a virtual private server user currently utilizing Litespeed we highly recommend upgrading. If you’re unsure on how to upgrade a quick ticket to our support team and they’ll assist you with getting upgraded.