Why We're Upgrading All Servers to CloudLinux 8

Over the last two months, our team has been working on upgrading all of our shared, reseller, and semi-dedicated servers from CloudLinux 7 to CloudLinux 8. We wanted to provide more insight into why we did that and the benefits of the upgrade.

Before June, all our shared, reseller, and semi-dedicated hosting servers ran CloudLinux 7. This was possible as our control panel software, cPanel/WHM, introduced extended lifecycle support for EL7-based operating systems, despite those systems hitting an official end-of-life as of June 30, 2024.

This was a very appreciated feature, though it was ultimately a temporary solution to a long-term problem, which is why our team spent the better part of a year testing, debugging, and nearly perfecting an ELevate process for our environment. I’ll take this opportunity to give all those involved with that work the recognition they deserve. It was an arduous testing process, and it was not fun, but they figured it out, and they deserve all the credit in the world for getting us to this point.

What are the benefits of moving to CloudLinux 8?

For starters, we’re no longer running an EOL operating system! Even with extended support from cPanel and backported security patches from CloudLinux, it’s generally not a good practice to run EOL anything, especially an OS.

The upgrade also addresses a number of longstanding bugs we’ve seen with CL7 and older versions of cPanel/WHM that were not set to be fixed, so the only solution was an upgrade.

Several performance improvements and optimizations are at the kernel level and deep within the system internals, especially around memory allocation, specifically within a web hosting environment. If you’re the type that is interested in those changes, you can find the official changelog here (https://cloudlinux.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011022679-CloudLinux-OS-8-FAQ)

With a current OS, we can natively run newer versions of system software and programming languages, like MariaDB and Perl. Speaking of programming languages, even with upgrading to CL8, we’re still able to support our extensive PHP version library, including versions back to 5.X releases and up to 8.4.

Using CloudLinux 8 also allows us to upgrade to the most recent release of cPanel/WHM, and with that comes a bunch of exciting new features:

Team Manager: Before cPanel 118, you were limited to one cPanel user with login permissions. The new Manage Team interface allows you to add users to your account with various levels of permissions, referred to as roles. This will enable you to provide limited cPanel access to your IT team, developers/webmasters, or staff within your organization who do not need full cPanel access.

Improved DMARC Support: As email authentication via DNS records like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC becomes standard, cPanel has introduced better DMARC control for all domains under your account. It has also introduced control and configuration options through the Email Deliverability interface. Previously, you could only add these records using the DNS Zone Editor interface directly.

Sitejet Improvements: The drag-and-drop site builder Sitejet continues to see improvements in usability, features, and performance when building your site. They have also recently added an AI generator, helping you more easily create unique content specific to your website!

While we’ve done everything possible to minimize the downtime and impact to all services through these upgrades, we know any downtime is frustrating, even when scheduled. I wanted to thank our customers for their patience and understanding while their services were unavailable during the upgrade process.

And a note to our cloud compute customers: some of you may be running cPanel/WHM in a CentOS 7 environment that requires an upgrade. We’ve learned a lot about this ELevate upgrade process, and our team can assist if you encounter a bug or unexpected output through your attempts to upgrade.

Another option, if you’re looking for a safer route, would be to purchase a second compute and then use WHM’s Transfer Tool to migrate your cPanel accounts between computes. This method would involve an IP change for the websites or services you host from the compute. Still, it would eliminate any risk of using the ELevate tool on your production compute.

We hope this helps explain why we’re moving to CloudLinux 8. Our team remains available for any questions or concerns you have about your hosting after these upgrades.