What is your favored OS for dedicated hosting servers, i.e. Fedore, *BSD, Redhat...

Tell us a little bit why (please more than "It's what I always used")

Should be interesting to hear everyones thoughts on this topic.

Natron

Centos.... built from redhat enterprise... updates free... OS Free....

Ps. *BSD is also cool...

Personally I like gentoo the best, it fits my needs well... And I belive you meant distro, as gentoo, redhat, fedora, etc are all part of the linux OS.

-Greg

redhat all the way

This I know, let me clarify, what distribution of the UNIX type operating systems do you prefer.

Please comment on the portions of the distro that you like for your use.

Freebsd 4.10 is quite good, and it is very stable!!

Depends on the type of person you are. Do you like learning and troubleshooting your own problems, or do you like friendlier programs.... If you want a less stressful program and are new to linux, then go with redhat/fedora, if you are more hardcore, use freebsd or debian even. If you plan on running a hosting business, just go with fedora, alot more things support it.

Also, watch out for kernel exploits!

THanks
Jesse

RedHat, I'm used to it.
I also would like FreeBSD, but it's not so popular at dedicated server providers with good support.

My favorites are Debian and FreeBSD.

Debian: Alternative to Fedora (RedHat is EOL), excellent packaging tool (apt-get).

FreeBSD: Secure, easy kernel upgrades, port system, excellent memory and processor maangement (great OS to use with high-end machines).

FreeBSD 4.9 with some minor kernel tweaks can really be a mean machine.

The reason for choosing FreeBSD over other operating systems is the ease of maintenence and the handling of cpu and memory use. The OS has endless boundrys and its open source.

Quick Example:

One client moved from a Red Hat version with Mysql and Mail setup on a 10M commit. The company sends about 670,000 emails per month. Typical transfer took about 2 days to complete. Once he moved to our provider we installed FreeBSD 4.9 and optimized mysql as the company had it on there linux server with the same version becasue the db's had to be transfered over, after we done this their mailing list software can push all the emails within 2-3 hours.

It might be the way you configure the machines but in my perspective FreeBSD takes it....

Redhat (9) because I've used it since the olden days (4.1? heck I forget was the first version I remember using).

FreeBSD, because its less dramatic (eg. experienced users dont run into as many problems as they do with Linux, or so it seems). Its actually a lot easier to use and understand if you can devote some time to it.

FreeBSD and Debian because they don't bundle immense amounts of unrequired crap in the base install.

Debian is very easy to keep up to date with apt-get.

I had some comments about Redhat, but I've snipped them, as I don't have time for a ruck. :stickout:

If you prefer linux use Gentoo or Debian

NetBSD; stable & secure without all the strangeness of FreeBSD.

Fedora, switched from FreeBSD to Fedora and I find it a lot easier. But as I'm not a techie, I dont know if its stable or safe.

I am getting from this that they are all good builds to go with then.


Good info guys...

What do you guys think about Whitebox Linux versus CentOS?

CenOs is good.

I've been using Linux since 1997 while I'm working on data centres as well.

I tested many distributions and I prefer Debian.
It's free, it's stable, it has the BEST package manager and is the only true linux.

In the other hand SuSE is much better than RedHat and I don't know really why many people still like RedHat.

FreeBSD is better for more experienced users.

Hope that helps