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When looking at cloud hosting providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine (GCE), Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Aliyon Cloud etc, they come with charges for every bit of service provided. In these providers, each instance (CPU & RAM), Disk, Traffic(Incoming & Outgoing), IP(more than one), DNS are charged separately, hence if you are looking to host a website all these should be taken into consideration. Keeping apart the charges on other resources, the price that will endorse upon the traffic will always come as a surprise as they have much policy for different regions and connection.

Whereas in Providers like DigitalOcean Cloud, Vultr Services etc they provide a package on monthly basis with prepaid billing(safer), thus you will have more control of your bills. But the disadvantage of these services is that they have limited features compared to the first list. Also adding up of space or bandwidth, user’s are forced to choose next bundle rather than increasing them individually. As of now, they offer additional disk in some regions.

Other option would be to choose dedicated cloud resource and build server or environment on them. These are provided by companies like Linode Cloud. Here the resources can be used according to the need or availability of resources. Same is provided by IBM Cloud, OVH Cloud, RackSpace Cloud, M5 Cloud etc but on a larger scale.

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Apart from the above, we have many options like the storage is redundant and cloud-based while the resources are shared like Cloud VPS given by OVH, 1and1 etc. The best you get of this is that they might offer unlimited bandwidth etc.

To conclude we suggest taking statistical review before switching to a cloud resource and choose one which is better according to the need of application or website.

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Login to WHM
Select Litespeed Web Server
Litespeed Configuration > Admin Console > Configuration > Server > External App > lsphp5
Under Environment section >> add “PHPRC=$VH_ROOT”
Under “suEXEC User ” section >> add the account username for which custom php.ini has to be enabled.
Under “suEXEC Group ” section >> add the group name of the same account.
Click save and return to Main >> Litespeed Web server
Under Quick Configuration of PHP suEXEC settings,>> Set Enable PHP suExec to yes.
Restart lightspeed web server
After that put custom php.ini in the user’s home directory and check it using a phpinfo page.

Hardware Virtualization/Server Virtualization
Server virtualization is the creation of a number of virtual instances of any operating system on a virtual platform. These operating systems are known as guest operating systems. There are 3 types of server virtualization.

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Full virtualization: Full virtualization using special software known as a hypervisor. Hypervisor or virtual machine monitor is a process that creates and runs virtual machines. It allows the host computer to run multiple guest VMs by virtually sharing its resources, like memory and processing.
Paravirtualization: Since every operating system receives information about the needs of other operating systems hosted on the same physical server, paravirtualization hypervisor manages guest operating systems that do not require large computational resources.
OS-level Virtualization: Involves altering the operating system in order to run different applications that can be operated by different users working on a single system at one time.

Network Virtualization
Network virtualization combines physical networking equipment and software network resources and network functionality into a single resource. It divides bandwidth into multiple, independent channels which can be assigned to servers and devices. There are two types of Network virtualization:

Internal: A single system is provided with network-like functionality
External: Many networks are combined into a virtual unit

Storage Virtualization
Storage virtualization, also known as cloud storage is the process of combining the physical storage from multiple storage devices so that it looks like a single storage device. There are two types of storage virtualization

Block Level Storage: In block level storage raw volumes are created and each block can be used as an individual hard drive. Server based operating system controls these blocks and each block can be formatted with the required file system.
File Level Storage: File level storage forms a logical pool of storage and enables users to use a logical path to access files.

Application Virtualization
Application virtualization can be abbreviated as ‘app virtualization’, i.e the separation of an installation from the client computer that is accessing it. It helps the user to use an application remotely from a server. The applications, executed on the virtual platform behave like it is directly interfacing with the original operating system. There are two types of application virtualization

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Remote application Virtualization: Remote applications run over a server. Through the remote control protocol, end users can view and interact with their applications on a network. The remote programs can be integrated completely with the user’s desktop so that they act like local applications, with the aid of technology known as seamless windows.
Streaming application virtualization: Virtualized application is executed on the end-users local computer. When an application is requested, its components are directly fetched to the local computer on demand. Certain parts of the application are required in order to launch, rest can be downloaded in the background as needed. Once the download process is completed, a streamed application can function without any network connection.

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Working of Apache
In order to handle additional connections, Apache creates threads and processes. The server can be configured by the administrator to control the maximum number of allowable process. Too many process exhaust memory and also apache refuses additional connection when the limit of the process is reached. Apache is flexible in terms of how it processes web requests. This is based on the Multi-Processing Module (MPM) used. The three main Apache MPMs are Process (Prefork) MPM, Worker MPM, and Event MPM.

Working of Nginx
Nginx works differently than Apache. Nginx does not setup new process for each web request, instead, the administrator configures how many worker processes to create for main Nginx process. Thousands of concurrent connections can be handled by each worker. To read data from disk, Nginx spins off cache loader and cache manager processes and load it into the cache and expire it from the cache when directed. Nginx can act as a reverse proxy server for TCP, UDP, HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols. It can also act as a load balancer and an HTTP cache. Nginx uses a single-thread to handle the web server connections.

Strengths of Apache
Apache provides a wide range of built-in support.
Support for the latest HTTP 1.1 protocol.
Simple, powerful file-based configuration.
Support virtual hosts, PHP scripting, Java Servlet, and JSP. Support for Secured Socket Layer (SSL).
Apache has extensible Plugin Architecture.
Weaknesses of Apache
Performance and scalability issues.
Slows down under load.
Strengths of Nginx
Lightweight and able to handle more than 10,000 simultaneous connections.
Takes less memory and other resources.
Reverse proxy with caching.
Load balancing and fault tolerance.Embedded Perl scripting.
Weaknesses of Nginx
Lack of built-in support for Python and Ruby.
Nginx Plus version is not free.

Performance
Apache can handle static content using its conventional file-based methods. It can also serve the dynamic content by embedding a processor of the language in question into each of its worker requests. Nginx does not have any ability to process dynamic content natively but it serves static content much faster than Apache. NGINX is about two times faster and consumes a bit less memory (4%).

Security
Even though both apache and Nginx have a secure code base, both get stuck by security vulnerabilities. Comparing both, Nginx is slightly more secure than Apache with its centralized single configuration management.

Operating System
Apache has full support for Microsoft Windows and runs on all kinds of Unix-like systems.
Even though Nginx has support for windows, its windows performance is not as strong as other platforms.

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Apache vs Nginx Comparison

Apache is easier to configure than Nginx configuration is not easy.
In comparison to Nginx, Apache has excellent documentation.
Event-driven Architecture (EDA) is used by nginx whereas Apache uses process-driven architecture.
Nginx has non-blocking nature while Apache has blocking architecture.
Nginx uses Single-thread that means that it doesn’t create a new process for a new request. But in Apache, a new process is created for a new request.
Nginx has a very low memory consumption for a static page but, in case of Apache, memory consumption is high because of the requirement of creating a new process for each request.
Nginx is extremely fast as compared to Apache when it comes to serving static pages.
Nginx lacks the support of operating systems such as OpenVMS and IBM, but Apache supports the complete range of operating systems.
As Nginx comes up with required core features, it is much lighter than Apache

Even though security bugs are seldom found within the web server, apache update is important in order to take advantage of the latest security features available.
Optimize Apache settings

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In order to optimize web server performance, several apache settings can be tweaked.

MaxKeepAliveRequests: The maximum number of requests accepted per connection is set out in this directive. The higher this value, the better the server performance. The recommended value is 500.
KeepAlive: This directive helps to display a webpage with reduced load time. Creating many connections may reduce the loading time but it also utilizes the resources on the server. Enabling keep-Alive directive helps to overcome this issue. Transfer all those files through a single connection rather than repeatedly opening and closing a new connection.
KeepAliveTimeout: The amount of time apache will wait before closing the connection for the subsequent request. Setting keepAliveTimeout to a high value can cause high load server performance problems.

Disable Unnecessary Modules

To extend the functionality and security of Apache you can add an unlimited number of modules. There are numerous Apache modules by default which are actually not needed. You could divert the modules to elsewhere, which makes the loading time longer and occupy dedicated server resources. To make our server less susceptible to threats it is important to disable the unnecessary modules. Mod_imap, mod_include, mod_info, mod_userdir, mod_autoindex are some of the modules that are usually not needed.

Run apache as separate user and group

With the default installation, Apache runs its process with user nobody or daemon. Create Apache User and Group and make an entry in apache configuration file, so as to tell Apache to run with this new user and restart the service.

groupadd apache
useradd -d /var/www/ -g apache -s /bin/nologin apache

Configure MULTI-PROCESSING Module

One of the reasons for Apache’s slow performance may be its inability to handle the load. A multi – processing module will be helpful in such cases. MPM prefork module is part of CentOS 7 and is enabled by default. If mod deflate is enabled, MPM prefork module (shared) will be displayed for better performance. You can set this in the httpd.conf file.

You can add the following lines in the file considering the CPU and RAM allocated for the server.

<IfModule prefork.c>
StartServers 5
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxClients 150
MaxRequestsPerChild 3000
</IfModule>

StartServers: This sets the number of child server processes created at startup. This can initially be kept as a small number and increases gradually on a high payload server. This helps ensure the correct use of server resources.
MinSpareServers: This sets the minimum number of idle child server processes and can be configured for high payload servers.
MaxSpareServers: This sets the maximum number of idle child server processes. If this value is exceeded by the number of idle child server processes, the idle processes are killed
MaxClients: This is the maximum number of requests that Apache can handle simultaneously. The connection will be queued once this limit is reached.
MaxRequestsPerChild: This shows how many requests a child process handles before it ends. The child process will die once this limit has been reached. If the value is set to 0, the process will never die.

DNS Lookups

The main reason for slowing down the Apache web server is the time it takes to perform DNS lookups. In its access.log file, Apache records the full host name of each incoming client connection. Resolving each one takes a long time. The HostnameLookups option allows the DNS lookup to log hostnames instead of the IP address. HostnameLookups is Off by default in Apache.

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You can verify this by editing the configuration file of Apache. Make sure that the line HostnameLookups reads:

HostnameLookups Off

When you’re done, save and close the file and restart Apache to reflect changes.
Use Allow and Deny to Restrict access to Directories

We can restrict access to directories in the httpd.conf file with the options “Allow” and “Deny.” In this example, we will secure the root directory by setting the following in the httpd.conf file.

</Directory>
Options None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</Directory>

Options None: This option prevents users from enabling any optional features.
Order deny, allow: This is the order in which the directives “Deny” and “Allow” are handled. Here it will first “deny” and then “allow.”
Deny from all: This denies everyone’s request to the root directory, no one can access the root directory.

Tweak MySQL and PHP settings

Web servers seldom work alone. In most cases, a database server such as MySQL and scripting language support such as PHP to accompany the Apache web server. We have realized why optimizing the database server is equally important to avoid bottlenecks in it, which can slow down the web server. We also improve the performance of PHP pages using a caching or accelerator mechanism such as Zend OPcache.

MySQL is further tweaked by options such as table fragmentation and configuration settings – maximum connections, buffer size, size of the query cache, pool size, etc.
Conclusion

It is very easy to configure Apache for maximum performance. You can experiment with different options and measure the performance of the web server using various tools. We at Skynats have large experience in apache server optimization and you can contact us via Live Chat to know more details.