In a shocking announcement, CentOS Project has today informed the public for CentOS 8 support ending by 31 December 2021.
Moreover, CentOS Project announced that in the years to come CentOS Stream which was released earlier last year and is a midstream between Fedora Linux and RHEL will be the one where all development will be focused going forward.
CentOS Stream will be ahead of the current RHEL release – the development branch. As a result companies or users who seek stability will need to purchase an enterprise license for RHEL or switch to a different distro like Ubuntu.
CentOS 7 users will continue to receive support as originally promised by CentOS Project till 30 June 2024, but unfortunately, CentOS 8 support ending has been announced much earlier than originally expected.
Major web hosting control panels will be affected by CentOS 8 support ending & CentOS Stream Focus
1. How cPanel will be affected by CentOS 8 support ending
According to cPanel documentation, to this day it is not recommended to use CentOS 8 with cPanel for production systems so luckily it is not very widely used.
cPanel is most likely going to be keeping support for RHEL and by 2024 hosting providers who wish to stick with cPanel will have to incur an additional license cost.
cPanel users have already been struck twice in the past 1.5 year with pricing changes and if cPanel does not add support for any additional linux distributions costs will increase even more.
2. How Plesk will be affected by CentOS 8 support ending
Support for CentOS 8 has already been announced for production systems by Plesk and probably a high number of users have already made their move in hopes for long term support.
Update:
A petition was started requesting CentOS Project board to keep CentOS a stable downstream of RHEL.
11 Dec 2020: cPanel has announced support for cPanel on Ubuntu LTS by late 2021. CentOS 8 will also be supported until it’s EOL date (31 December 2021).
Summary
We will be updating this article regularly as more information is being released.
It will be very interesting to see how could these breaking news affect the web hosting industry and big companies developing control panels.
More information on the future of the CentOS Project can be found on CentOS Stream FAQ.
As part of our cPanel Server Management and Plesk Server Management for any servers we setup in the past months, we always advised customers to stick with CentOS 7 till mid 2021.