Today’s topic is CloudLinux. So how did I find CloudLinux and what is it? A while ago I had a disaster with my VPS, and this blog was wiped out (all data gone). I moved to a new hosting provider, and I noticed some new things in the cPanel sidebar.
CloudLinux main features
- The CPU use shown is for your account only and is shown in real-time. It is not the entire server, so when it says 100%, it means you’re maxing the CPU limit (1 core) which has been configured for your account.
- Concurrent connections: despite the wording implying connections to your site, the idea behind concurrent connections is actually the amount of active processes on your account. These processes can be cron jobs, PHP processes, Perl processes, etc. A single user should rarely, if ever, consume all 20 connections, so this metric is mostly informational.
That is one of the features of CloudLinux. CloudLinux is the first commercial OS that meets the specific needs and demands of web hosting. Imagine if servers going down due to one customer suddenly hogging all the resources was no longer possible. CloudLinux is making rock-hard hosting stability a reality. In a typical server environment, there are no hard limits in place for each user.
There are of course things you can limit (PHP memory use, cron job execution, disk space, bandwidth, etc.), but those aren’t the things users do that will really hurt you. The majority of resource problems stem from CPU use, disk I/O, bad MySQL queries, and other runaway scripts.
CloudLinux is not free, but it has a reasonable price of $14.00/month for 1 server license. If you are planning or already own a web hosting server, using CloudLinux + WHM/cPanel would be perfect for managing your clients’ hosting accounts. One hosting company that uses this technology is HawkHost, and I’m happily hosting this blog on their great service.
You can find more about CloudLinux in their official documentation.