LWS cPanel hosting
LWS cPanel hosting
from 2.99€ monthly
Pros
- Integrated Varnish caching system
- Fast support resolution time
- 1-click installation feature
Cons
- No 1-click optimization features for websites
LWS (Ligne Web Service SARL) is a high reputation french web hosting company. I was their customer since 2015. Here is my review for their cPanel hosting plans.
LWS company overview
LWS aka Ligne Web Services SARL is a french long-time established web hosting company. This company is a very good alternative for OVH, iKoula, …
More information is available on their website.
LWS cPanel hosting overview
LWS cPanel hosting is based on high performance servers running on CloudLinux 7 OS. It means that all websites get locked inside LVE (Lightweight Virtual Environment), which reduce neighbor effects and extensively enhance global website performance. This technology improve also security.
They use the well-known cPanel as control panel for all cPanel shared hosting products (cPanel hosting, cPanel reseller hosting and Cloud cPanel Hosting) but also have others offers with other control panel.
All cPanel hosting comes with SSD storages with almost unlimited space (file storage not allowed by TOS).
About performance, website get automatically Varnish optimization with the Cachewall plugin on the cPanel server. Unfortunately, there is no way to enhance performance if your website is not compatible with Varnish or if you have very dynamic content.
Update from April 14th, 2021: Their cPanel is now running with Fastest Cache plugin which provide firewall and caching solution. This is running on NGINX and Varnish. Overall caching performance seems to be better:
cPanel M package benchmark
Bechmark result collected on April 23th, 2021. This benchmark is made using Apache Benchmark tool in CLI. To avoid any ISP perturbation in my end, all tests was run from a SoYouStart (OVH) dedicated server (Debian 10).
At the beginning, each test I’ve made was blocked by firewall. Yep, their firewall is a bit strict. I got my IP whitelisted by contacting support (I didn’t mention that I need it for benchmark).
HTML Hello World test was just an index.html containing literally “Hello world”. Having Fastest Cache enabled or disabled didn’t has a huge impact, I think that Apache is correctly set up at a point that serving static file from Apache is as quick as serving static file from Varnish cache.
PHP Hello World implies using PHP compiler. We just put the following code in the index.php to perform this benchmark :
<?php echo 'Hello world'; ?>As you can see, having Fastest Cache enabled reduce performance. This is because PHP didn’t send any caching rules to the Varnish service, so Fastest Cache become a tunnel/bottleneck.
Testing with fresh WordPress show the full potential of their caching system with increases over 2000% the server performance. However, the performance without caching is pretty common, I’ve got approximately same values with other hosting companies.
Now time to add the WP Fastest Cache plugin into this fresh WordPress (don’t confuse Fastest Cache, the LWS server-level caching, and WP Fastest Cache, a caching plugin from another editor). As we can already expect, this plugin itself enhance WordPress performance : from 29.03 requests per second to 451.18 request per second.
Adding WP Fastest Cache over LWS server-level caching seems not a good idea. We see a bit performance loss. But this may be due to cache preloading from WP Fastest Cache. Unfortunately, I didn’t tested few days after WP Fastest Cache installation.
Now comes with Prestashop tests. Once again, we get something very fast: 76.38 requests per second. On other providers, I used to get around 40 requests per second. Adding server-level caching got a very little performance loss, but I think this was just due to misconfiguration under Prestashop (I’m a newbie in Prestashop world).
