When it was announced in late 2020 that CentOS 8 would reach its end-of-life in December of 2021, both the open source and web hosting worlds were understandably taken a bit by surprise.
With this in mind, we are very pleased to announce that cPanel & WHM® version 94 will fully support AlmaLinux immediately upon its launch date (expected to be within March of 2021). Being day 1 partners with AlmaLinux is not only a testament to our close working relationship with CloudLinux, but also the beginning of a significant partnership moving forward. You can expect the same high level of quality support from cPanel & WHM as we’ve provided (and continue to provide) for CentOS.
What Is AlmaLinux?
AlmaLinux can somewhat be considered a natural evolution of CentOS, which itself was derived from RedHat Linux. CloudLinux is included in this lineage as well, and the fact that all of these distributions originated from RedHat makes AlmaLinux an ideal replacement for CentOS at this time.
CloudLinux created AlmaLinux to facilitate a clear path forward, and we have found that AlmaLinux does essentially work as a “drop-in” replacement for CentOS.
What This Means For You
We’re here to help our Partners and Customers with their upgrade plans so all users of cPanel & WHM have a smooth experience. We investigated other Linux distributions and found AlmaLinux to be a wise choice for most users who currently enjoy CentOS.
Moving forward, we will do our best to ensure to mitigate vendor risk related to cPanel support. One way we are doing that is adding support for Ubuntu LTS. With multiple Linux distros to choose from, and different OS vendors, any unexpected end-of-life announcements will no longer carry the same impact.
If you have any feedback or comments, please let us know. We are here to help in the best ways we can. You’ll find us on Discord, the cPanel forums, and Reddit. Be sure to also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.