For years, Apache and Nginx have powered most of the web. They are still excellent. But for shared and WordPress hosting, LiteSpeed Web Server has quietly become the better choice. Here is why we moved every Baasa Cloud server to LiteSpeed.
What is LiteSpeed
LiteSpeed is a drop-in replacement for Apache that reads the same .htaccess files but delivers content much faster. The core advantage is its event-driven architecture, which handles thousands of concurrent connections without spawning a separate process per request.
Real numbers from our network
After moving our shared hosting fleet to LiteSpeed, average Time to First Byte (TTFB) dropped from 412ms to 142ms across East African traffic. Page load times on WordPress sites improved by 62 percent on average.
Why this matters for your business
Visitors leave sites that take more than 3 seconds to load. Google ranks faster sites higher. For e-commerce, every extra second of load time costs you roughly 7 percent in conversions. Speed is no longer a nice-to-have, it is the price of entry.
What this changes for you
Nothing. Your WordPress site, your cPanel, your databases all work exactly as before. The performance improvement is invisible at the application layer, but very visible to your visitors.