Traditionally Web Host-Focused CloudLinux Rolls Out TuxCare, an Enterprise Brand

For most of its 12 year history, CloudLinux has been focused on the web hosting industry, centering its business around CloudLinux OS, a commercial Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and designed to meet the needs of web hosting companies. Today, the operating system powers more than 20 million websites running on 200,000 servers, the company says.

Along the way, it found that some of its offerings -- most notably a service for live patching Linux machines without a reboot -- were also attracting some enterprise customers and began nurturing that market by adjusting some of the products they were using to better suit enterprise needs.

In May, with enterprise customers now accounting for roughly half of its business, according to product manager Vitalii Stavropolskyi, the company launched a new brand, TuxCare, specifically for enterprises. With the new brand came a new website, with all enterprise-focused products moving off the CloudLinux site.

"Building out a larger brand to house our rapidly-expanding set of services makes it easier for our customers and prospects to see everything we provide in one place," Jim Jackson, CloudLinux's president and CRO, said in a statement. "Under the new TuxCare umbrella customers can review and select everything they need from our cohesive collection of services to take care of their Linux infrastructure."

TuxCare for the Enterprise

The new brand, named after Linux's penguin mascot, puts the CloudLinux products KernelCare (rebranded as Live Patching Services), Extended Lifecycle Support, and Linux Support Services under the same online roof.

The company's Live Patching Services includes all of the important components in the Linux stack, not only the kernel but things like widely-used shared libraries, such as glibc and openssl. Enterprises with must-run workloads that can't afford downtime like it because the patches are applied on the fly, with no need for servers or services to be restarted.

Linux Support Services also offers security patching but adds 24/7 incident support, even for Linux systems that are past their end of life.

"Whatever the reason may be to run systems past their EOL, TuxCare can ensure they remain secure and up to date with security patches," the company says on the TuxCare website.

Supported software includes Oracle Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, CentOS, and AlmaLinux, as well as other open source software. The company said that TuxCare's components fully integrate with most management and monitoring systems that enterprises commonly use, such as Nessus or Qualys, and can be deployed using standard deployment software like Ansible, Puppet, or Chef.

CloudLinux OS Solo a Hybrid

Just because CloudLinux has decided to spend more effort catering to enterprises doesn't mean it's going to be turning its back on the web hosts that helped build its business. Its eponymous Linux distribution remains its centerpiece, squarely aimed at the hosting market.

"We don't want to position CloudLinux OS outside the hosting market," Stavropolskyi told DCK.

This doesn't mean that the company isn't going to try to release products that appeal to both markets, however.

This week, for example, the company released the beta version of another RHEL-based operating system, CloudLinux OS Solo, designed for running websites on virtual private servers. While the OS primarily targets web hosts, it's also meant to appeal to any organization that wants to run websites from a VPS.

This is the first hosting product that the company has released that's not aimed at a shared hosting environment, Stavropolskyi said, pointing out that these days many organizations are moving from using shared hosting accounts to hosting their web sites themselves, on premises, as VPSes. In addition, many hosting companies are now offering VPSes as options, and Solo might be a better choice for their inexperienced customers than something like CentOS, AlmaLinux, or other Linux server distributions.

Out of the box, Solo will be equipped with PHP X-Ray to help users quickly find the cause of performance issues, whether they're due to slow database queries, functions, or external calls to APIs. PHP X-Ray can also find performance bottlenecks and reports these issues to administrators -- along with advice on how to fix them.

By the time Solo gets its first stable release in a month or two, it will be fully optimized for running the WordPress content management system, including a suite of tools specifically designed to optimize WordPress using caching modules and database optimization.