CloudLinux license tiers explained: Solo, Shared, Shared Pro

CloudLinux sells three SKUs — Solo, Shared, and Shared Pro — and the choice hinges on tenancy model and which monetisation modules you want turned on. The names are deceptively neutral; the deltas between tiers change the unit economics of a shared-hosting node, and a Solo licence mis-applied to a multi-tenant box is the single most common compliance trap.

This article covers what each tier includes, who each one is for, and where the upgrade paths make sense. If you have already decided, head to CloudLinux activation; this is for buyers still mapping SKUs to their fleet shape.

How CloudLinux licensing actually works

A CloudLinux licence is bound to the IP address of the server that runs the agent. One licence, one IP — clnreg_ks calls home every few hours and the agent refuses to enforce limits if the IP no longer matches the activation record. That mechanic matters for the licensing math: 30 shared-hosting nodes means 30 licences, not one cluster-wide licence.

Volume pricing kicks in past 10 to 25 servers depending on the reseller. Direct purchasing from CloudLinux Inc. lists the public per-server price; resellers like panellicense discount based on fleet size, and the savings compound once you cross the 25-server line.

All three tiers ship the same base feature set — LVE (Lightweight Virtualised Environments) for per-user CPU, IO, and memory isolation, CageFS for per-user filesystem jails, the PHP Selector, Python Selector, and Node.js Selector, MySQL Governor, SecureLinks symlink protection, and HardenedPHP patching for end-of-life PHP versions. The differences sit on top of that base, not under it.

Solo — single-tenant only

Solo is built for the single-user VPS case: one buyer, one server, no resellers, no second cPanel account. The agent technically refuses to provision a second tenant.

It is the cheapest tier — public list is around $14 per month — and it makes sense for two buyer profiles:

• Developers and agencies running their own client sites on a single VPS, who want PHP Selector and CageFS for version flexibility and isolation but never resell hosting to a third party.
• Existing CloudLinux fleets wanting a personal or staff node alongside the production shared-hosting boxes.

The trap: if you sell hosting to a single paying customer on a dedicated box, you cannot legally use Solo. The licence permits one end user — meaning you. The moment a third party pays you for the account, the box is multi-tenant and needs Shared or Shared Pro. Some hosts have had licences revoked over this, and the agent reports back enough metadata to spot it.

Shared — the workhorse SKU

Shared is the default for any real shared-hosting node. No cap on cPanel users, full LVE enforcement, the whole stack. Public list runs around $35 per month per server, and the cost-per-user shapes plan margins — a node packing 200 users runs about $0.17 per user per month in CloudLinux cost alone.

You get everything in the base feature set, plus the Reseller Limits plugin in WHM that lets your resellers carve sub-limits inside their own package allotment (resellers can shape LVE limits inside their own quota), the ABUSER mode in MySQL Governor that throttles only the offending account instead of the whole database, and the SecureLinks symlink protection hardening for cross-account file access.

Shared does not include AccelerateWP Premium or X-Ray Premium. The free versions of both ship, but the premium features — the LSCache tier on AccelerateWP and the on-demand request tracing in X-Ray — require Shared Pro or a separate add-on SKU.

Shared Pro — Shared plus AccelerateWP and X-Ray

Shared Pro adds two things that materially change the value proposition:

• AccelerateWP Premium bundles LSCache, Redis object cache, and a CDN tier for WordPress sites on the node, configured per-user from cPanel. It is pitched as a page-speed upsell hosts can resell as a paid add-on. See AccelerateWP setup on cPanel for the configuration walkthrough.
• X-Ray Premium is the PHP profiler with full request-tracing data and scheduled scan support. Free X-Ray gives basic snapshots; Premium gives the data a support team actually needs to debug "my site is slow" tickets. See the X-Ray profiling guide.

Public list is around $45 per month per server — a $10 delta over Shared. The breakeven calculation is straightforward: if you resell AccelerateWP as a $3 to $5 add-on to even five percent of users on a 200-user node, the delta pays for itself and the rest is margin.

Tier comparison at a glance

Volume discount tiers via panellicense cut materially off list once you cross the 25-server threshold; the contact form is the right path for a fleet quote.

CloudLinux vs AlmaLinux as the base OS

Worth mentioning because it sometimes derails the licensing decision: AlmaLinux is free and binary-compatible with RHEL, but it does not ship LVE, CageFS, the Selectors, or MySQL Governor. Those modules are what make CloudLinux a shared-hosting OS, not a generic enterprise Linux. The CloudLinux vs AlmaLinux comparison covers the trade-off in detail — short version, AlmaLinux is the right base OS for a single-tenant box and the wrong choice for shared hosting.

Upgrade and downgrade paths

You can move between tiers at any time without reinstalling the OS or the agent. The licence server pushes new entitlements within minutes of the SKU change, the features that are no longer licensed simply stop running, and nothing on disk changes. That means you can pilot Shared Pro on one node for a month, then either roll it out fleet-wide or downgrade back to Shared with zero downtime.

To verify the active tier on a node:

cldetect --check-license

The output names the tier and the activation IP, which is the same string the billing portal uses for SKU mapping.

Next steps

• Install CloudLinux on cPanel walks the conversion from CentOS or AlmaLinux to a fresh CloudLinux node.
• LVE tuning for shared-hosting density covers the CPU and memory limits to set once the licence is active.
• Reseller limits in WHM explains how the Shared and Shared Pro tiers expose sub-quota controls to resellers.