CloudLinux

CloudLinux OS is a unique product that was built for the web hosting market. It helps to secure servers by providing extra security for each one of the users that run inside the server. This leads to gain more server stability by leveraging system resources like CPU, IO and RAM.

CloudLinux OS Benefits for Shared Hosting Providers

CloudLinux is an operating system that is built in front of your current CentOS / RHEL S.O. It has its own system binaries and libraries to make your cPanel shared hosting server more secure every day.
CL was built and designed to work on the shared hosting industry, although you can use it with dedicated servers that have many websites hosted inside.

CloudLinux uses a technology called LVE (Lightweight Virtualized Enviroment) that creates new system limits for system users resource usage, it can also allocate certain amount of resources for each user you define, like CPU, RAM, network connections, IO usage, among many other things.

Another cool thing about CL is the fact that it also creates a virtual jailed account for your users, like they call it: a cage. CageFS is another important part of CloudLinux that ensure that each website will be “caged” or “jailed” inside its own virtual environment. This helps to prevent massive defacing and hacking attempts if one of the websites is indeed hacked/compromised.
This way you can stop massive malware infections, viruses and root intrusions to your server.

CloudLinux Features

Stability: CL brings a new concept of stability by making your servers way more stable than ever, thanks to the limits that you can configure for each users, high load averages will surely disappear once you’ve configured this software on your shared hosting servers. Thanks to LVE manager you can have full control over your network connections, processes, RAM memory used, IO disk usage and CPU for each system user. Quickly act and limit your script abusers and your server will remain stable at all times.

MySQL Governor

Is another key part of CloudLinux, and often the most critical part of high server loads. Poorly written SQL queries on CMS and customised web applications are one of the top reasons for high load average issues on shared hosting servers.

CageFS

Is the technology that jails or cages each one of your users, it works encapsulating each customer inside its own virtual environment, this prevent massive server attacks and stops virus and malware spreading across all your server hosting accounts.

SecureLinks

is a low level kernel technology that is used to mitigate kernel symbolic link attacks, its part of a good kernel hardening that all shared hosting servers should have in their setups.

HardenedPHP

in common web hosting environments, old PHP versions are outdated and full of bugs and security vulnerabilities. However, CloudLinux offers backward compatible support for 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4, and fixes their vulnerabilities and bugs permanently. This allows you to use your old PHP based applications without the need to upgrade to newer versions.

PHP Selector

CL allows each system user to have their sites powered by different PHP versions such as 4.4, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, and 7.0. CloudLinux OS also makes it easy to have this versions updated as it updates to newer versions as soon as they become available.

Ruby Selector

CL Ruby Selector let developers choose different Ruby versions so you can install the desired version, along with all the needed Ruby gems (modules).

Python Selector

This python selector is the same as PHP and Ruby selector, it allows developers to choose between different Python versions and modules to be installed.

Mod_lsapi

this is one of the greatest things about CloudLinux, mod lsapi is the fastest way to serve PHP pages for shared hosting environments. 100% compatible with .htaccess, it will make a huge difference in terms of processing speed, causing your server to use less RAM and CPU.

About the Author: Esteban Borges

Experienced Sr. Linux SysAdmin and Web Technologist, passionate about building tools, automating processes, fixing server issues, troubleshooting, securing and optimizing high traffic websites.