Latest updates are a nighmare

I’m sorry to hear you’re not thrilled with v4.x, but appreciate your well thought-out review! I’d like to clarify some things, if that’s ok.

If you’re a free Quic.Cloud user, well, your quota will be filled in a week or two – since v.4 of this plugin, a lot of more credits are consumed in UCSS, LQIP and Guest Mode – I know because I use Quic.cloud and Litespeed since launch and today they appear to be more greedy…

This is Guest Optimization (GO) causing this. If you keep GO disabled, credit usage should be the same as it was with previous versions. By design, GO enables the maximum number of optimizations, including those that use QUIC.cloud quota (CCSS, UCSS, LQIP, etc). If you have a site that didn’t have those QUIC.cloud optimizations enabled before, then yes, using GO will increase your credit usage.

This information has been in our documentation for some time, and is linked to from the plugin interface. However, we recognize that people don’t always click the Learn More links, so in the next version of the plugin, we are changing the link to be more clear. It will tell you that there are warnings you should read before enabling GO.

1) Are purging itself CSS and Cache, consuming more server resources;

This was fixed as soon as it was reported, in the latest release.

Version 4.x went through a beta testing period before becoming available in the Plugin Directory. If issues such as the ones you list had been reported during testing, we would not have published to the directory until they were fixed.

I’m not sure about the status of the other issues you mentioned, but if you are experiencing these things, I encourage you to contact the support team for help.

5) Guest mode is a trick to consume much more of your credits and to makes Google thinks you page are fast. Not at all because first load on your site will be much slower than without plugin), only when cached you’ll see some benefits. This not pay off and makes things worse.

This, especially, is the point I want to clarify.

• To be clear, Guest Mode (GM) and Guest Optimization (GO) are two different things. Your comment is really more of a criticism of GO.
• Our intention with GO was not to be underhanded and sneakily steal all of your QUIC.cloud quota away. As I explained earlier, the usage of QC quota is disclosed and documented. If you don’t wish to use your quota on this, simply don’t enable GO. The whole GM/GO system is disabled by default.
• Most importantly, your point about page speed tools being “tricked” into thinking your site is fast: that’s not exactly how I would put it. Guest Optimization is really meant for people who are chasing high page speed scores at all costs (and trust me, such people exist). It’s not appropriate for everyone, especially if enabling it negatively affects your page experience for actual human visitors! Plus, if you want the page speed tool to reflect your site’s real world usability, then GO is not helpful in that situation. This is also in our documentation.

There are several ways for a plugin like Lightspeed (and other cache/minification plugins) to optimize a website in a healthy way, Litespeed has been deviating from that lately unfortunately.

Many of the features we implement are at the request of our users. You’d be surprised how many people want a feature like Guest Optimization.

We implement many, many optimization features, but not every site owner is going to see value in every feature. That’s why we keep all new optimization features disabled, and allow site owners to choose what they want to try.

I hope I’ve clarified some of the issues a bit. I appreciate you taking the time to leave a detailed review, and encourage you to open a support thread if you want to follow up on any of those other issues you may be experiencing.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by LiteSpeed Lisa. Reason: Fixed bad HTML

Lisa, I really appreciate your time to answer me, but acting as a PR person who only defends the company and doesn’t manage a real situation is not the best way to communicate with the market and its customers, let alone solve problems which are indisputable, after all I’m not the only complainer.

For you to understand: I own and also co-owner of several companies (not counting partnerships), I have relationships with countless companies and my own companies are responsible, among many things, for offering development, communication and, of course, hosting solutions. In addition to being a longtime WordPress contributor (under other profiles), I have my own team of developers and discussions with teams from various partners and the most varied experts in hosting and website optimization.
We are unanimous in our opinion about the recent plugin and function changes in your CDN. As it is, it has deliberately become unsustainable to use Litespeed and Quic.Cloud technology for our needs.
As there is a large investment in infrastructure and levels of quality and reliability that we must offer to our customers and partners, it is unacceptable that a sudden paradigm shift of the Quic.Cloud platform together with Litespeed does such damage to hundreds of websites we offer.

We didn’t use the Guest Mode feature and didn’t make any changes to the plugin settings. The simple automatic update of it to versions 4.xxx together with the handling changes of CSS, Cache, LQIP and Combine functions made our sites consume dizzyingly more credits, more bandwidth, CPU usage on the servers and there were also regrettable spontaneous crashes in the layout.
It took a lot of work for everyone involved (I’m talking about hundreds of professionals) to diagnose and isolate the problem, including me.
Several of us joined your Slack group, opened direct support tickets and also made support posts here on WordPress.
What I want you to understand is that I am being a spokesperson for a long list of companies and people who have perceived recent changes as problematic and I am here diplomatically for you to reconsider your current direction or we will have to redirect our platform decisions by leaving to other, more reliable technologies.

We made a big investment in Litespeed infrastructure and even paid plans for your CDN integration, but currently there is a lot of effort and even situations where usage is simply not functional. If this situation persists, and unfortunately we believe it will continue due to the negligent attitude towards problems (such as your response to our review), we will have to change our contracts to other options and not recommend to any of our partners or customers the use of your solutions.

As you said, maybe for independent developers, enthusiasts or occasional customers the use of your platform is more suitable lately, but it’s not what we were offered in the contract years ago. With the exception of the Litespeed hosting infrastructure, all ecosystem products such as Quic.Cloud and the WordPress integration plugin itself are no longer to be trusted.

This is not a point of view, but a fact that we are sharing with you and we look forward to seeing how willing you are to really fix the recent issues.

Best regards,

One last reply and then I’ll let it go.

acting as a PR person who only defends the company and doesn’t manage a real situation is not the best way to communicate with the market and its customers

I can see how it might appear that I am just “a PR person,” since I don’t participate much on these forums lately. But LiteSpeed is a small company, and many of us wear multiple hats. Responding to reviews generally falls to me because I am the writer. Mainly, I write documentation, blog posts, and website content, but I also handle our social media presence, and I sometimes jump in to provide support. I’ve written nearly all of the LSCWP documentation, and in my off hours, I tend to my own WP site, which I developed fifteen years ago and have customized considerably over the years. I use LSCWP myself, on my own time.

TL;DR: I have experience with this plugin from a few different angles, so please believe me when I say I understand your pain points.

We didn’t use the Guest Mode feature and didn’t make any changes to the plugin settings. The simple automatic update of it to versions 4.xxx together with the handling changes of CSS, Cache, LQIP and Combine functions made our sites consume dizzyingly more credits, more bandwidth, CPU usage on the servers and there were also regrettable spontaneous crashes in the layout.

This concerns me. As I mentioned before, we are a small company. I know every employee. And I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt, if v4.x has been consuming more credits than v3.x, it is not by design. There has absolutely been no conscious choice on the part of LiteSpeed to increase your quota usage.

If this is actually happening on your domains, then there is a bug somewhere that needs to be squashed.

You mentioned you’ve been on Slack before. I looked for some of your conversations so I could see the details of your reported issues firsthand, but you seem to have used a different userid, and I couldn’t find anything.

Would you be interested in coming back to Slack and helping us investigate this further? Our beta testers didn’t have these problems, so it would be helpful if we could see what is different about the sites you and your colleagues are running.

In particular, we’d need at least one domain name where you noticed this behavior, along with any other details you could provide about which plugin features were enabled pre v4, and which were enabled post v4, which services seemed to be consuming more credits than before, etc. You can send this information directly to me via Slack DM (I am Lisa @ LiteSpeed over there) and I will make sure to put you in touch with the right people to get to the bottom of this.

I hope to hear from you on Slack.

Hi, again.

We’ve spent a lot of time today at LiteSpeed discussing this situation internally and reviewing a few things about the v4 upgrade. Here is what it comes down to:

1. We have found an issue where QUIC.cloud quota consumption unexpectedly increased for some users after upgrading to v4. We had anticipated some increase in usage, which is why we had doubled the amount of free credits for Page Optimization. But there is one scenario where credit consumption increased quite a bit for some sites, and this was unintentional.
2. I think you’ll find that the new CCSS by URL setting was enabled for your sites. If you disable this setting, your QC quota consumption will return to normal.
3. We’re genuinely sorry for this oversight, and would be happy to issue complementary credits for any unexpected usage. Please contact us about this on Slack or open a ticket.

Additionally, we still really would like to chat with you about any other issues you have encountered with v4, so that we may address them one by one. I hope you will take me up on my previous invitation to connect on Slack.