Here’s how you install LiteSpeed on a WHM/cPanel Server – it should take about 25minutes from start to finish, only about 5 of those minutes involve you doing anything, and it should give you no downtime during the installation procedure. (Although don’t quote me on that – we did install LiteSpeed in a maintenance window and advise you to do the same!)
To write this tutorial I installed LiteSpeed onto one of our Fully Managed Servers which was previously pulling a load average of 15-20, running low on RAM and had sluggish page load times due to a very high amount of visitors. Since installation the load immediately dropped to 1.8, it has 50% RAM free and the sites hosted on it are loading instantly, we love Litespeed – it is absolutely brilliant – if you’re still running Apache with cPanel you probably shouldn’t be! 
Imagine that sort of performance boost across a whole shared hosting network with no extra hardware cost!
How to Install LiteSpeed on a WHM/cPanel Server
- Go buy a license from LiteSpeed and note down the license key. (They also do a free 14 day trial).
- Login to SSH as ‘root’ on the server running cPanel.
- Copy/paste the following command and hit enter:
cd /usr/src; wget http://www.litespeedtech.com/packages/cpanel/lsws_whm_plugin_install.sh; chmod 700 lsws_whm_plugin_install.sh; ./lsws_whm_plugin_install.sh; rm -f lsws_whm_plugin_install.sh
- Login to WHM and click the ‘LiteSpeed Web Server’ button.
- Click ‘Install LiteSpeed’ and let it run through the installation procedure, this is completely automated.
- Enter your license information & assign an administrator password (Don’t tick the box to start LiteSpeed immediately!)
- Click ‘Build matching PHP Binary’ - this will take 10-20mins (Apache will stay running)
- Click ‘Switch to LiteSpeed’
- Click ‘Admin Web Console’ and login with the details you setup in step 5.
Final stages of setup (Most of which is in LiteSpeed admin)
- Configuration > General > Index Files > Edit
Set the following:
Index Files: index.html, index.php, index.php5, index.htm
Auto Index: Yes
Auto Index URI => /_autoindex/default.php
Hit ‘Save’
In SSH Type:
ln -sf /usr/local/lib/php/autoindex /usr/local/lsws/share/autoindex
Now back to LiteSpeed Admin:
- Configuration > Log > Server Log > Edit
Set the following:
Log Level: Info
Debug Level: None
Hit ‘Save’
Now click ‘Actions > Graceful Restart’ to make these changes permanent.
Optional LiteSpeed Installation Procedures
Want your users to be able to have their own PHP.INI file?
In LiteSpeed Admin:
- Configuration > External App – then hit ‘Edit’ next to ‘LSAPI App / lsphp5 / uds://tmp/lshttpd/lsphp5.sock’ if you’re running PHP5 (or the one for lsphp4 if running PHP4)
In ‘Environment’ add the following line:
PHPRC=$VH_ROOT/
Then hit ‘Save’
Now click ‘Actions > Graceful Restart’ to make these changes permanent.
This will allow them to have their very own php.ini in the root folder of their hosting account which overrides the /usr/local/lib/php.ini file, this is a security risk though so be careful.
Want your users to be able to use Frontpage Extensions?
Run this command from SSH:
sed -rie ‘s/(safe_)?chmod\(( )?0600,( )?(“\$\{myuid\}”,)?( )?”\$(\{)?homedir(\})?\/public_html\$\{subweb\}\/_vti_pvt\/service.pwd”( )?\);/\1chmod(\20644,\3\4\5″$\6homedir\7\/public_html${subweb}\/_vti_pvt\/service.pwd”\8);/’ /scripts/fp-auth /usr/local/frontpage/version5.0/apache-fp/fp-auth /usr/local/cpanel/bin/convertfppassthrough /scripts/fixfrontpageperm
Then run this command from SSH:
/scripts/fixfrontpageperm
Forgot your LiteSpeed admin pass?
Run this within SSH to reset your LiteSpeed Admin Pass: /usr/local/lsws/admin/misc/admpass.sh
Got any questions about LiteSpeed? Ask them on the LiteSpeed forum.
