Ask HN: Best distro for Web Servers - CentOS or Ubuntu ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best distro for Web Servers - CentOS or Ubuntu ?

4 pointssein9 comments

Please share your experiences.

Based on administering some 15 or so servers at work, I'd full-heartedly recommend Ubuntu Server. We started out with CentOS but are now (slowly) migrating to Ubuntu Server.

Ubuntu has a wider selection of more up-to-date packages and lots of handy helpers (like tasksel and other config wizards) that will make your life a lot easier.

For anyone who suggests that Ubuntu is for desktops, not servers, remember that the Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikipedia exclusively on Ubuntu servers. [Citation: http://www.ubuntu.com/products/casestudies/wikimedia]

I've found the stock ubuntu repositories tend to have more up to date packages. For centos I end up needing to add external third party repositories to get basic LAMP-stack stuff current. That said, I still use centos for most things mostly because current centos is supported by the virtualmin install script, and I use virtualmin for many projects.

All said, there's not a huge difference between centos and ubuntu for basic web server administration - you still need to understand the underlying tools - apache, mysql, dns, etc. regardless of the OS chosen.

Agreed - I've worked at RH, have the odd bit of code in the distro, and prefer RHEL in other situations (mass deployments at corporates) but for my own projects, the sheer volume of packages in Ubuntu beats EPEL (the RHEL extras repository)

It is much more important to do a good job administering the boxes then it is which distribution you pick.

From my personal experience and from those two choices I would pick Slackware ;) If forced to pick something other then probably debootstrapped Debian.

Agreed, both are based on the linux 2.6 kernel so you cant really go wrong. I use Redhat in the production environment, CentOS in development and Ubuntu for desktops. When it comes down to it, its preference, which do you prefer to work with? apt-get or yum. Do you prefer the layout of the ubuntu file system or centos? Which is easier for your to administrate?

personal experience, we consider ubuntu as desktop class operating system.

go for debian stable releases, some of our servers have ran for over a year without rebooting/OS upgrade on Amazon EC2, or maintenance.

ubuntu is based on debian, so your transition will not be tough

Gentoo or FreeBSD

*BSD

Well, at least you don't have to compile java anymore. That used to be a few hours of wasted time.

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