40% of the 2021 Open Stack Survey respondents indicated Ubuntu as their primary OS.

cPanel^® L.L.C., the Hosting Platform of Choice, a WebPros^® portfolio company, is expanding its collaboration with Ubuntu to provide full support for Ubuntu LTS 20.04 with cPanel & WHM version 102.

In the winter of 2020, CentOS 8 announced that it would be reaching its end-of-life in December of 2021. This news was somewhat unexpected in the open-source and web hosting worlds. In response, cPanel has been working towards providing solutions that will benefit our partners and customers and expand options as we move forward together.

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Our Commitment to Growth
Aila Power, VP of Product Development, said: “Ubuntu is a solid Linux Distribution with a great track record of security and innovation. I’m really excited that cPanel & WHM are now available on this distro that is the first choice for many when they build a new application.” We provide greater Operating System (OS) diversity, more substantial stability, and increased safety for our customers and their customers.

Our collaboration with Ubuntu will give cPanel & WHM users more open-source Linux distribution architecture options within their current infrastructure while providing a more robust business suite of solutions to help customers scale and expand their business hosting operations.

“Ubuntu has long been the platform of choice for large scale compute estates and Canonical are delighted to partner with cPanel to mitigate the impact on long term stability and predictability brought about by the changes to CentOS” shared Mark Lewis, VP of Application Services, at Canonical | Ubuntu.

Ubuntu shared statistics from their 2020 HackerEarth Developer Survey, highlighting 66% of experienced developers and 69% of students prefer Ubuntu over other Linux distributions. For those looking for the most significant amount of the latest open-source software to work with, Ubuntu is a solid option.

For example, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS comes with over 30,000 open-source packages such as Python, Ruby, Go, Java, Apache, Nginx, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Node.js, PHP, and more.

These are some reasons why Ubuntu continues to grow in popularity as one of the most popular Linux distributions.

Since its inception, Ubuntu has consistently gained market share, reaching almost 50%. Now is an excellent time if you have been thinking about trying Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is currently supported on our EDGE Tier, intended for testing or non-production environments. Having received excellent feedback from EDGE users, and in anticipation of fully supporting Ubuntu when cPanel & WHM v102 goes to RELEASE in Q1, we are pleased to announce that cPanel will provide 5 years of complimentary support through April 2025.

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What is Ubuntu LTS?
LTS, or Long-Term Support, means that a version of the operating system is supported and patched by the developer for a minimum of five years. Canonical releases a new LTS version every two years, with thousands of security patches applied to each version through their lifecycles making Ubuntu LTS predictable, stable, and secure. Ubuntu has several similarities to CentOS, but with some notable differences that benefit specific situations. For example, development or application hosting utilizing more modern technology may find Ubuntu a preferred Linux distribution. Single-user servers may also particularly benefit.

What This Means for You

As our partners and customers continue to investigate and execute their upgrade plans due to the CentOS announcement, we remain committed to providing as smooth of a transition as possible. Additionally, we are taking the necessary steps to mitigate any single vendor risk to cPanel support in the future. By supporting multiple Linux distros from different OS vendors, any unexpected end-of-life announcements from third parties in the future will no longer be as impactful.