What Makes CloudLinux So Great?

If you have a shared hosting account with us, then you’ve no doubt noticed some massive speed increases over the past month. We’ve spent the past few weeks tuning, testing, and tweaking our shared hosting platform to be faster and stronger than ever before. In addition to the all-new hardware, SSD storage, and heavy software optimization, we’re now running everything under CloudLinux.

So what is CloudLinux, and why do you care? CloudLinux is a Linux-based operating system specifically built for web hosting. At its core, it’s built to dramatically enhance the stability and performance of the server by enforcing limits on how many resources any given account can use.

To understand why CloudLinux benefits you, it helps to understand exactly what “shared hosting” is. For the sake of this explanation, think of “shared hosting” as a drive through restaurant. Customers drive up, place the order, collect their food, and drive away. With a web server, visitors connect to the site, order their desired page, receive the page, and disconnect. A single shared server might host hundreds of websites, so picture a strip of road with a few hundred drive-through restaurants. See where this is going?

So let’s imagine that your website – your drive-through restaurant, if you will – is having a normal Monday morning breakfast rush hour. Suddenly you notice no more customers are coming in. You look across the street and notice that your neighbor is absolutely slammed with customers. His line of traffic gets so big that it prevents other customers from visiting other nearby drive-throughs. Eventually things get so bad that the road becomes completely gridlocked and nobody can do anything.

(In reality, shared hosting is a lot more complex than this. We have a lot of tricks up our sleeve to help prevent things like this from happening – more on that later – but this is the gist of it.)

In the example above, CloudLinux would behave like a traffic cop. When a neighboring site gets slammed with traffic, CloudLinux does whatever it takes to make sure that your resources aren’t affected. It might briefly block off traffic to your neighbor’s site. Or maybe it will throttle their database connections and disk throughput. Whatever it takes to keep them from bringing your site down, CloudLinux will attempt to do.

It does this through a system called Lightweight Virtualization Environment, or LVE.  You can read more technical details on LVE right here, but the short of it is that your website is now faster and more stable than ever before.

But CloudLinux does so much more. By now you may have noticed some additional information appearing in your cPanel interface. Thanks to CloudLinux, you can now quickly and easily see exactly how much CPU power and memory your website is using at any given moment. This helps you quickly analyze peak hours, or determine if it’s time to upgrade your site to a VPS. And in just a few more weeks, we’re going to introduce jailed SSH access for clients – also made possible by CloudLinux!

The end result is that our shared hosting environment – which was already pretty spiffy to begin with – is now faster, more secure, and more stable than it ever has been before. Page load times have been significantly reduced, CPU load has been greatly reduced, and MySQL transaction times are at all-time lows. This can mean happier website visitors, more return traffic, better search engine rankings, and maybe even more purchases.

In other words, it’s just another step in our commitment to building the fastest, most reliable shared hosting platform on the planet.