For companies that require more control over the performance of their site and their server environment, CloudLinux is a great option. CloudLinux is a very popular environment for servers, and currently underpins about 20 million websites.
CloudLinux provides a modified kernel based on the OpenVZ kernel. The main resulting feature is the Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE) — a separate environment with its own CPU, memory, IO, IOPS, number of processes and other limits.
This ensures that tenants on the same server cannot jeopardize the stability of their servers, causing all sites to slow down or even come to a halt. CloudLinux OS also “cages” tenants from one another to avoid security breaches. This way, unstable scripts or malware are not able to sprawl across other customer’s sites.
But that’s not all — CloudLinux has a number of features that Virtual Private Server and dedicated server users should be interested in.
Security Benefits
CageFS is a virtualized, per-user file system that uniquely encapsulates each customer, preventing users from seeing each other and viewing sensitive information. CageFS prevents a large number of attacks, including most privilege escalation and information disclosure attacks.
HardenedPHP secures old and unsupported versions of PHP (4.4.9, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, 7.1) which are no longer supported, but are used by 85% of all PHP users!
In some cases, CageFS won’t be able to protect against symbolic link attacks. From there, SecureLinks is a kernel-level technology that prevents all known symbolic link (symlink) attacks. It enhances the security level of the servers even further and prevents malicious users from creating symbolic link files (where an attacker tricks Apache Web server to read some other user’s PHP config files).
Performance Upgrades
Mod_lsapi is a drop-in replacement for SuPHP, FCGID, RUID2, and ITK, Mod_lsapi is the fastest and most reliable way to serve PHP pages with Apache servers.. It has a low memory footprint and understands PHP directives from .htaccess files. Mod_Isapi also:
- Doesn’t suffer from stability issues in process management like PHP FPM and mod_fcgid.
- Includes the full benefits of opcode caching.
- Is compatible with MPM Worker and Event.
- Does not require tuning.
- Is a drop-in replacement for existing ways to serve PHP.
Other Features
If you have customized needs that require you to use a particular version of PHP, Ruby, or Python, the PHP, Ruby, and Python Selectors allow users to select which version they want to use with simple dials in the user interface.
MySQL Governor monitors MySQL usage and throttles abusers, preventing them from overloading the server, which improves overall stability and performance.
These features are really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to CloudLinux. If they sound like something your website could benefit from, contact us today to discuss your options!
