Back in our early days, we used to offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on our hosting platform for customers who paid us a few extra bucks a month. Eventually, we discontinued it since there was a stable option available that was also free to use: CentOS. CentOS was bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL which meant that the only thing different was the name. Software certified to work under RHEL, such as cPanel, of course worked the exact same way on CentOS. Why offer two products that are exactly the same but one is free and the other costs money?
With December’s announcement by Red Hat that CentOS was going to focus solely on CentOS Stream, pushing up the end-of-life for CentOS 8 from 2029 to December 31, 2021. We never got a chance to roll out CentOS 8, thankfully. Within that announcement, Red Hat left a vague note that they’d be opening up RHEL with some low-cost, no-cost options. Yesterday, January, 20, Red Hat announced that the Red Hat Developer program would increase the previous limit of 1 developer license to 16 and that these 16 licenses would also be valid for small production workloads.
We have decided that since anyone can sign up for a Red Hat Developer subscription at no cost, we will bring back RHEL to our platform under the “BYOL” terms we use for Windows – that is, in order to use RHEL on a dedicated server (we’re going to work on bringing this to our VPS platform in the near future), you must have a RHEL subscription tied to the server which can be one of your available 16 licenses. Once the server is provisioned, you are free to register the system or our tech support team will work with you to walk you through the process.
And, we still plan on making the CentOS-alternative available to customers as well. Currently, we have plans to support both Alma Linux and Rocky Linux.
