I have been selling Colo and Dedicated servers for a bit over a year. We are mainly a FreeBSD house, and prefer it over Redhat and the like.

For us it's easy to help out users and upgrade the OS, preform software upgrades, and especially easy to install software, or teach our users how to do most of these things on FreeBSD.

From time to time we get a few users who ask for RedHat, or what have you on the box, and we dont mind installing it, and still attemptig to help the user out as much as possible in supporting the systems.

When I first started out long ago, I was put on a VAX machine.
I then started working on solaris, and from there I ended up with Slackware, where I learned my basics, and then moved to Redhat. After I foudn RedHat, I was given access to a box running FreeBSD, and after being shown the ports collection, and a bunch of other nifty features, I quickly moved to it, and have been using it for years since. I now occasionally work on the newer RedHat, Debian, and Slackware versions as customers occasionally need help with them.

I am just curious as to why people choose the OS that they do, compared to others, and how willing they are to at least work with and try other Operating Systems?

Like for example, other providers like CI Host, and RackShack seem to really only offer Windows and Redhat, or just Redhat.
And I know both of those companies use drive copiers to just copy (now older original installs) with older software versions to new drives over and over again, but how does that look to most consumers out there?

Just looken for some opinions around :)

Thanks,
Ukyo

I think most datacenters will stick to one distro for the same reason that you did - ease of use for techs. For CPanel hosts, they tend to use RedHat, as CPanel is more stable on it than FreeBSD.And I know both of those companies use drive copiers to just copy (now older original installs) with older software versions to new drives over and over again, but how does that look to most consumers out there?Most companies will install the newest versions, complete with all of the patches - If they don't, then they're leaving their customers' servers vulnerable to attacks. I know that at Nocster, they'll provide fully managed support for RedHat, but not for other Linux distros. They're willing to install any other distro of Linux, as well as Windows, though. Most hosts will install any operating system for their clients, but some may charge extra for this.

-Josh