thislab.com - Web development and design by Fred Wu.

This is a How-to guide for users who want to install and experiment LiteSpeed on LxAdmin Host-In-A-Box, with or without Apache.

If you don’t know what LxAdmin Host-In-A-Box is, please check out this link. Also here is a nice review. In short, LxAdmin is a free/cheap alternative web hosting control panel to cPanel.

And LiteSpeed is a high performance, lightweight commercial web server that outperforms Apache, or even Lighttpd. The standard version is free, but has a limitation of 150 concurrent connections.

All my current shared hosting accounts are using cPanel, I wasn’t a big fan of it because it was (and still is) bloated and buggy. cPanel 11 did improve a little bit so I now at least don’t *hate* to use it. I’ve been playing with different web control panels for a few years now. Did I mention I once even co-owned a web hosting company? :) I personally prefer the simplicity of DirectAdmin, and the nice interface-feature balance of Interworx-CP. Although they are very good control panels, they aren’t free. Web developers (such as myself) and programmers often need VPS or even dedicated servers to perform live testing and debugging. A free control panel seems to be a nice and affordable addition to this process. :) I had been searching for one for years. Believe it or not, all free control panels sucked at that time. They either had the feature or had the interface, but never had both. Until recently (and that was about a year ago) I had discovered LxAdmin, it is in my opinion the best overall free/cheap control panel to date. I got the free 300-domain license a while ago, I’m not sure if it’s still available but even if it’s not, it is dirt cheap. Feature wise it is much more powerful than DirectAdmin, and interface wise it is pretty similar to Plesk (which by the way I don’t really like, but still better than other free ones such as ServerCP).

I discovered LiteSpeed a few years ago and had played with it for a bit. At that time the free version still has a concurrent connection limit of 300. Anyway, the experience was pretty good. It is a shame though that the price tag for the enterprise version is a little extreme for personal use. If I had a high profile website or a company website then I would definitely consider using LiteSpeed. It has a very useful web GUI that controls all the configuration. No messing around with shell commands and files any more!

Okay that was a little background story, now let’s begin incorporating the two together.

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My two-month vacation in China is almost over, I’m now starting to get back to ‘work’. There are a few interesting and exciting projects under the hood. :)

Doing development work in China is more challenging, many web resources are filtered/banned in China including Wikipedia. It’s not funny to rely on proxy servers for accessing information. :(

The good thing is however, bandwidth here is unlimited (oh did I mention I’m in Australia where bandwidth is more expensive than sliced bread?), and DVDs are dirt cheap (I just bought 100 of them, shee don’t tell anyone).

GG

Ever since the word ‘blog’ has been invented (or discovered) I have played many different solutions, Wordpress has always been my favourite. My old sites run on it, and my new site (what you are currently seeing) run on it.

I had a very tiring day, actually it’s a two-day roll. I’ve been completely sucked into making the theme working, and as a result of that I did not sleep at all last night. Fortunately the website is now up and running, all the basic stuff are done so in the upcoming few days I will be doing more adjustments and tweaks.

A few moments ago I took a quick nap, and I woke up seeing my theme was gone: Wordpress reverted back the system to its default theme (K2). I never encountered such problem before so I googled it. Sadly no satisfactory results had been found. Right now I’m just going to rename the theme to ‘default’, seems to be working fine. :)

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For the 325985th time, I am relaunching thislab.com, a website that dedicates to my web development and design work.

The past few weeks have been very unproductive, fortunately I am now picking up the pace. This website is soon to be launched completely. Please let me know if you find bugs. :)

A little heads up, I will be working on a very cool and useful web application in the upcoming months. It’d be a great tool for us web developers and designers, that’s all I can say for now.

I should also mention that I am always available for contract / freelance work, feel free to give me a buzz at any time.

Cheers