What Is CloudLinux

The web hosting industry today is an extremely competitive space. One key area a company can rely on to be thriving is providing high levels of stability, which is easier said than done. In a traditional Shared Hosting environment, unexpected resource usage spikes, traffic surges, and hacking attempts are just a few of the problems a system administrator may face daily. Ultimately, this can result in higher customer churn, directly impacting a hosting companies ability to grow.

CloudLinux, which made its debut in 2010, became a must-have for web hosting companies that understand the importance of stability and security and the effect on customers this could have when a problem appears.

CloudLinux currently powers 20,000+ servers for over 2,000 web hosting companies thanks to its easy drop-in replacement ability for CentOS. As a drop-in solution, your system administrators should be able to adapt to CloudLinux just fine.

Data collected from numerous web hosting companies using CloudLinux reported higher uptime, significant server density improvements, and a substantial reduction in the number of reboots and account suspensions. With everything added together, this results in a significant decrease in customer churn rates.

The software specifically made for web hosts running cPanel control panel with multiple accounts.

CloudLinux Benefits

cPanel Account Resource Caps

Without CloudLinux, a user would have the ability to use as much of the server resources as their website needed. While any respecting provider would love to accommodate the occasional spike, this can have profound implications, such as a single user consuming all of the server’s resources, leaving none for other customers.

Enhanced server security

Thanks to the innovative CageFS technologies, each web hosting account is fully isolated from another, preventing one user from seeing other customers on the same server. This has aided in the prevention of numerous attack vectors, especially privilege escalation.

Increased server efficiency

Given the ability to place caps on the resources a single cPanel account can use, web hosts are no longer required to leave most of the server as idle capacity to account for spikes. In other words, each server can now accommodate significantly more websites on each server, which also helps web hosting providers offer cheaper web hosting solutions.

PHP Selector

When combining cPanel & WHM with CloudLinux, your customers will have full control of the PHP version they need to run their website. A customer will be able to change their PHP version right within their control panel, without the need to contact support. The PHP Selector can also go a step further, giving your customers will be able to choose which PHP extensions to enable or disable.

Hardened kernel

CloudLinux kernel takes into account that the shared hosting environment is unique. By design, it can naturally protect against trace exploits and symlink attacks while restricting the visibility of ProcFS to only what is essential — making your cPanel & WHM servers much more secure.

cPanel Interface

CloudLinux provides your clients with the ability to see exactly which resources they are consuming and pinpoint any spikes to specific times. This allows customers to take any necessary actions to prevent their account from hitting the resource limits in the future.

WHM Interface

The WHM CloudLinux interface enables system administrators to view how your server and the accounts on that server are operating. From here, you can configure each package’s resource allocations, view current and reached limits for each account, and more!