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What's the fastest stack for Wordpress/WooCommerce/PHP?
Last month I've been producing videos for LowEndBox TV, you can one of videos here (shameless plug)
I want to publish videos about getting the most out of your buck and next topic is:
Fastest stack for WooCommerce
I want to get your solutions and I will benchmark all of them! I'm asking here because there is always some less obvious solution that gets job done.
What's your stack for WooCommerce?
Some panel or install manually?
OpenLiteSpeed + Redis + MariaDB?
Nginx + FastCGI + MySQL + page cache on tmpfs(RAM)?
Or maybe "forgotten" tweaked Apache, like the one in KeyHelp?
Custom nginx compilation with newest GCC, cloudflare hpack, zlib patch etc. like nginx-ee https://github.com/VirtuBox/nginx-ee ?
Give me your ideas and I will do extensive benchmarks so we will get definitive, updated answer to this question!
Curious about benchmarks? If there will be difference in performance between paid panels (DirectAdmin, Plesk) and free panels? Get subscribed so you won't miss this video 
Comments
Nice. But wouldn't it be desirable to have a clickable link to LEB/LET in the description?
I'd like to add a few.
There's
centminmod by @eva2000
slickstack
wordops
webinoly
Yes, that is great suggestion.
@raindog308 could you do that please?
Using centminmod from April 2020. Rock solid, but I'm not sure if its still the fastest - CentOS7 kernel is very old and I saw big performance jump vs Ubuntu 22.04 on Ryzens/EPYCs in Geekbench. Even on Xeon v2 there was some jump.
This will be one of things I will bemchmark - some panels support only Ubuntu/Devian, some CentOS...
Centmin still doesnt support newer CentOS/Alma AFAIK, because it does many lowlevel optimisations in OS.
@eva2000 could you please tell us more about current state of Centminmod?
Did cloudflare/amazon zlib/hpack patches got merged into stable/mainline nginx? I saw some pull requests back in the day...
Only the costs of Control panel litespeed are completely wrong + don't forget hosters hold another remote big servers for backups.
add the cost of WHMCS, Monitors, Staff, Installers, Imunify360, Kernelcare and etc..
that you didn't put in your adding price.
Also don't forget the 16 usd for cPanel it's cPanel Solo not the others, and not the cost of additonal users.
Also one thing to remember, VPS out of the box won't have enchanted security for websites as shared hosting,
Yeah you can use free WAF rules with alot of false positive(suffer from it alot from managing VPSs with directadmin), and need to exlude or adjust rules in modsecurity rules.
Alot of deployment VPSs services not offer even modsecurity,
so yeah sometimes VPS is better, but for the majority of people i think shared hosting cannot be replaced for most websites in terms of features and security.
and btw, WP+Woocommerce != fast .. never
Why completly wrong? I've got it from Litespeed page. I can get it cheaper somewhere else?
Litespeed Enterprise Web Host Lite is cheapest I see with unlimited domains - cheaper one allows for just 5 domains and is limited really heavy with RAM so its not really fair comparsion with hosts that allows 10+ domains or unlimited (like MyW).
I mentioned features to show great value of shared hosting. Ofc I could include everything possible, but I didnt want to create edge-case with features available just in 3 hostings. I mentioned things that majority of providers will have. Its difficult to compare 1:1, because every provider has slighlty different option so its just couple examples so people watchibg will know how much they would spend just on licenses.
Softaculous is installer and I included it, you meant different kind of installer?
VPSes also require staff, WHMCS, monitoring, Im not sure why you say about that in shared vs VPS context.
Thats true, thats why we have WAFs such as cPGuard (RackNerd has it, protects really good).
But we also cannot tell that shared hosting = best security, as there are a lot of hosts that cut corners there. Dor example last year i tried host hostido.pl which has Imunify360... but it was disabled on default, not even alert mode!
You meant that WooCommerce cant be fast?
One of my clients is using WP+WooCommerce+Divi theme and has a lot of pageviews. It should be slow, he is running like 30 plugins... but because of nginx caching it is super fast!
Without cache it was painfully slow, but with cache his OVH dedi has just like 1-5% CPU usage, a lot of headroom.
Centmin Mod has 2 branches, 124.00stable and 130.00beta01. Both publicly support CentOS 7 only. But 130.00beta01 branch is where all the EL8/EL9 development work is for AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux 8/9 support and currently, there's a private beta forum on the official Centmin Mod forum which makes available an installer that allows 130.00beta01 to be installed and run on AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux EL8 OSes. If you're on official Centmin Mod community forums at https://community.centminmod.com/ I can invite you and give you access to the private beta for Centmin Mod 130.00beta01 for EL8 testing.
You can see all the public discussion and work being done via AlmaLinux thread prefix filtered URL at https://community.centminmod.com/forums/centos-redhat-oracle-linux-news.31/?prefix_id=83
Centmin Mod Nginx doesn't use official Nginx binaries which don't merge Cloudflare patches etc. As such Centmin Mod 130.00beta01 supports Nginx built with more options that official Nginx binaries don't have. Like
i.e. GCC 12 for Centmin Mod Nginx + quicTLS (openssl 1.1.1t forked with QUIC support) for Nginx HTTP/3 on Almalinux 8 VPS
With all the LEMP stacks out there, I think CMM is the fastest for Nginx and PHP-FPM services.
But you can also try something that is not common but also faster.
Linux > Nginx > Unit > PHP.
Not PHP-FPM based.
Not sure how much as changed but I benchmarked Nginx Unit Application Proxy with embedded PHP instead of PHP-FPM 6 yrs ago and yes Nginx Unit's embedded PHP if tested directly is faster than PHP-FPM but once you put Nginx web server in front of Nginx Unit App proxy, PHP performance ends up about the same as the bottleneck is Nginx web server itself in how fast embedded PHP or PHP-FPM performs. Benchmarks at https://community.centminmod.com/threads/nginxs-unit.12803/#post-54905
Nginx Unit embedded PHP managed 282.95 req/s when directly tested but put it behind Nginx proxy it's embedded PHP performance drops back down to 131-170 req/s compared to at the time Centmin Mod Nginx with PHP-FPM between 146-170 req/s
I don't claim to be the fastest but I was able to max out the pipe on a NetCup VM
https://loader.io/reports/6b91ea42bf6582873aa7d24a0409887f/results/d9d291021972964d314bb46a72fab357
I created this for my DevOps solution primarily designed for WordPress and PHP
https://github.com/noamanahmed/LEMP
If you have suggestions, i would improve it further.
I think most stacks do well in terms of handling static requests. Real issue is dynamic requests which can be only be fixed at application level by writing quality code and using transients wherever possible. Woo is limited by architecture but improving. Most of these stacks perform nearly equal at handling woocommerce cart and checkout pages (uncached). Some large stores based on Woo uses ESI to improve the performance.
Impressive result!
Litespeed + lscache
Or (ngx_pagespeed / caddy) + varnish cache
Thanks for the shout out, folks!
If anyone is interested, here's a brief update on SlickStack:
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/183972/update-on-slickstack-project-and-thanks-to-let
https://github.com/littlebizzy/slickstack
https://slickstack.io/install
I also think it's worth mentioning that I believe "stability" is just as important, and probably more important, than the raw "speed" of your stack (which may depend on config), because ultimately your performance and SEO signals are only as good as your ability to maintain them consistently over time.