I was asked recently (internally) about CloudLinux; What is it and why should we use it?

At first I actually had no idea about it, I had never even heard of it and struggled to first see the benefits of moving from our stable sturdy CentOS platforms to this foreign OS. However like anything I don’t know about in order to provide an answer I started researching.

This little entry serves as a note of my research and implementation of CloudLinux.

CloudLinux

The OS that prides itself on being the only one specifically designed for the shared hosting market, it radiates itself with benefits of security, stability and ease of management. But don’t all operating systems throw these points at you? – yes they do. There’s one point however that makes cloudLinux really stand out, “LVE” Technology.

LVE technology is really what makes CloudLinux different, CL developed this Kernel level module to simply “make sure that not one single web site can bring down your web server”, It does this by controlling / limiting (respectively) the amount of CPU and Ram accessible to a given process.

Why are we implenting it?

We always want to strive to give our customers exactly what they’re paying for + a little bit more, I was told about CloudLinux because it has the possibility of offering our clients better security and performance. We decided to give it a whirl and virtualize it for our shared hosting services, Initially I was a little bit “what’s the difference” but surely enough that LVE Technology gave me a new inner flame. So we’ve implemented it for the following reasons:

• It provides us better resource tracking (allowing us to better enforce our AUP)
• LVE provides us with “containers” for keeping a clients website, allowing them to get a better slice in the resource pool whilst us maintaing said pool with enforced limits
• Better detection tools for malicious scripting activities provides us with the ability to better inform you when somethings not quiet right!

Where is this being implemented exactly?

As CloudLinux stated “build for shared hosting” we’re going to implement this on our Shared Hosting services initially. I’m fairly confident the timeline will be:

1. A hand full of legacy shared hosting services
2. Our High Availability shared hosting
3. The remaining shared hosting servers

Benefits to you!

The benefits are pretty standout, if you read the above points you can already guess them. CloudLinux will allow us to provide you with:

• Greater Stability – CL Allows us to understand our resources better, giving us to the options and tools to refine how we share these out; giving you better speed / processing
• Greater Security – By placing each website in it’s own container we go from being a bunch of websites on a server with different permission sets to a “tenant” based system
• Tenants have a finite resource limit which is a slice of the overall available resources on the server; this stops other peoples websites spiking and impacting yours!
• Greater visibility – The all seeing eye, we need to know whats going on when we look, CL provides us with a model to do exactly that, by utilizing the “tenant” model each of your executions are run by your user inverse to being something like user “apache”

We can use this to see who’s executing that script that is spamming or that script that it trying to gain higher priveledges.

Overall CloudLinux is a great new addition and advantage to our shared hosting services, it will provide you with a better experience whilst simlessly intergrating into our existing systems.