cPanel is a very adaptive control panel as far as what platforms it will function on. However, like in most cases, it operates VERY well on one linux distribution, and not so well on others. I decided to do a bit of research as to why this is the case and found out that the most popular linux distribution to run cPanel on, is CentOS.CentOS comes packaged with ‘yum’, a mediocre package manager with a nice dependency handler, and is also considered an ‘RPM-based’ linux distribution, which attributes to it’s versatility.
According to linux.com, RPM development is on the road to revamping:
“Jeff Johnson was the chief maintainer of RPM (originally known as the Red Hat Package Manager) while at Red Hat, for much of the program’s life. Johnson left the company in mid-2005, when RPM was at version 4.4.2. He then continued development of the program on his own, distributing his own version at wraptastic.org.”
“*In December, they announced the result of their debate: a new community-driven development effort for RPM, to be centered around a revamped rpm.org Web site. The new rpm.org will host a source code repository, wiki, and mailing list.”
This means good things are in store for not only RPM based linux users, but for 3rd party vendors as well — ie: cPanel.
CentOS also has a very good reputation for not only being stable, but also secure without sacrificing it’s flexible nature.
Furthermore, CentOS is #1 on the top 5 RHEL (Redhat Enterprise Linux) based distributions:
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major
Apparently it’s the same with the customer base at cPanel. I spoke with David Grego, a member of the cPanel technical support team and he commented:
“Since a very large percentage of our customers use CentOS, we do devote more of our resources to ensuring that cPanel and WHM runs well on that distribution compared to other distributions.”
On the contrary, FreeBSD induces more technical issues in my experience. Once again, David fortifies my observations:
“I would presume that since FreeBSD comprises of between 1% and 2% of our customer base, the same general logic would apply. Also, with fewer customers comes fewer people testing our software during the EDGE phase to assist in filtering out bugs before it makes it to the builds of cPanel and WHM recommended for production use (CURRENT, RELEASE and STABLE).
I would also speculate that since cPanel and WHM are generally developed on a Linux platform then ported to FreeBSD, that could introduce many issues as the two Operating Systems though similar are far from identical.”
cPanel does not support or have any intentions of supporting the Debian distribution. Only 2 versions of Suse Linux are supported — and only 32-bit. On the other hand, cPanel supports CentOS in both the 32 *AND* 64 bit environments. So basically your alternatives to using CentOS/cPanel are limited via support:
http://www.cpanel.net/products/cPanelandWHM/linux/sys_requirements.htm
If you’re planning on deploying a cPanel server with SingleHop, CentOS should be your choice of operating system. Not only is our staff extremely proficient in common technical issues, but cPanel highly recommends it!