Linux is a good web OS, but it wasn’t designed for web hosting in mind. How can web hosting firms make Linux work better for them? By running the CloudLinux OS. CloudLinux includes a Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE) and LVE manager plugin that make web hosting easier and more profitable. 

The Limitations Of Linux for Web Hosting

Linux is a good operating system for Web hosting. It’s free, stable, and provides solid performance, which is why over half of the world’s web servers run a Linux distribution as their OS. Linux is not, however, optimized for web hosting, because it wasn’t designed specifically for that purpose. 

This has presented web hosting firms with serious challenges to overcome. How can they make a Linux-based web server support hundreds or thousands of sites simultaneously, while also remaining stable? How can they identify a particular site that’s using an inordinate amount of server resources? 

Both of these challenges affect a hosting firm’s profitability. Putting more sites on a server saves money, but doing it in a way that may crash the server, or enable sites to drain resources, can raise its costs or even cause customers to find another web host. In addition, to that malware on server, might be an issue, but it is a topic of another article - Top 10 Hosting Security Best Practices.

Overcoming These Limitations With LVE

The clear solution is to enable web hosts to control CPU and IO resource needs at an individual user level. This helps contain resource-draining sites, and also prevents a single customer from overloading and bringing down the server.

Now, with CloudLinux, web hosting providers can do that. By running CloudLinux as their OS, they can effectively manage their servers at a per user level. 

CloudLinux provides this capability through its Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE). Its LVE, unlike a hypervisor or virtualized container that creates a full virtual server, isolates hardware resources such as the CPU, I/O, and memory in a lightweight container. Its LVE then limits these resources to a specific process or customer. 

LVE Manager Makes Hosting More Profitable

With its LVE, CloudLinux achieves better separation between sites and prevents one from affecting others, even when one site generates a sudden peak load. Sysadmins can manage this using LVE Manager, a plugin for popular control panels (cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, ISPmanager, etc.) that allows them to monitor and set resource limits on a per-site basis. 

With its LVE and LVE Manager plugin, CloudLinux enables web hosting providers to lower their costs: 

• More customers can be serviced efficiently on existing infrastructure
• Better-optimized servers reduce hardware footprint and thus real estate costs
• More efficient servers mean fewer server upgrades and less maintenance
• More stable servers reduce expenses needed to support customers
• Fewer support staff are needed to manage more customers
• Less staff time is spent on fielding customer issues resulting from server outages

It also enables them to increase revenue: 

• More customers can be serviced more efficiently, increasing customer loyalty and lifetime value
• More efficient operations can free staff to focus on the introduction of more and better revenue-generating opportunities

Contact The CloudLinux Team

If you think your hosting firm could benefit from LVE Manager in its operations, or you know of a hosting firm that could, feel free to contact the CloudLinux team at sales@cloudlinux.com. A consultant will get back to you to talk about your particular needs.