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, we began working towards providing solutions that will benefit our partners and customers and expand options as we move forward together.

The goal is to provide greater Operating System (OS) diversity, more substantial stability, and increased safety for our customers and their customers.  With this in mind, we are happy to to fully support Ubuntu LTS 20.04 (and future LTS versions) officially beginning with cPanel v102.

Ubuntu continues to grow in popularity as one of the most popular Linux distributions and includes over 30,000 open-source packages such as Python, Ruby, Go, Java, Apache, Nginx, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Node.js, PHP, and more. 

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.

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.