Thread: Best OS?
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Old 04-13-2006, 07:05 AM
Coop Coop is offline
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I agree totally with Soulwatcher, the main thing you want as a webhost is stability. Many of the linux distros are constantly changing and being updated, but in general, you don't need the latest bleeding edge software.

The way redhat develop RHEL is that they keep the bleeding edge stuff in the free fedora core, so fedora is effectively beta software. Redhat are famous for relasing bug ridden code in that distribution, so if your a webhost, your clients are going to be raising far more tickets with various problems.

Once the code is considered stable, then it is merged into the next release version of RHEL and stability tested before release. So you are getting a well tested and stable OS. Redhat then have to release the majority of that code under the terms of the GPL, as most of it is actually free software.

The code they release to the public is freely downloadable, but is not quite a complete distribution, as some of the propriatory redhat code has been removed. This code is then repackaged into Centos by the Centos developers, and the few missing programs replaced with free alternatives. Most notably though, Centos also has yum avaialble for updates, which IMO works far better than the redhat alternative (up2date).

I have been running versions of Centos on servers for almost 2 years now, and have only ever had one problem when a bug in the bind update deleted my /etc/named.conf file (that was about a year ago, and happened to a lot of webhosts).

In comparison, I also used to run gentoo on servers at home. It worked well for a source distribution, but I would end up ineviatably having to fix some dependancy or build problem on at least a monthly basis.
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