FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE images are available
ftp.freebsd.org
ftp.freebsd.org
I only run RELEASE.
When I run into production issues, the developers say they have fixed my issue in CURRENT but never release a point update to RELEASE ... means forces me to have to wait until the next MAJOR release for it to be fixed.
Feels like FreeBSD, even though I love all it does, is becoming more and more just for developers.
We need more minor point releases and less major releases.
The following link from 2 years ago is still very applicable today.
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-Janu...
If you're able, we would very much appreciate community effort in helping to merge and test bugfixes to stable branches. Supporting the FreeBSD Foundation also helps to ensure there are resources to help make this a reality.
Any change to major release cadence, minor release cadence, branch lifetime, and access to new features implies a tradeoff against the others, as is clear in reading through the responses in the thread you link.
Only big vendors have the resources to maintain their own patched systems they can use in production.
Some of the highlights:
- GCC is no longer installed by default on architectures where clang(1) is the default compiler.
- Unbound has been imported to the base system as the local caching DNS resolver.
- BIND has been removed from the base system.
- make(1) has been replaced with bmake(1), obtained from the NetBSD Project.
- pkg(7) is now the default package management utility.
- pkg_add(1), pkg_delete(1), and related tools have been removed.
- Major enhancements in virtualization, including the addition of bhyve(8), virtio(4), and native paravirtualized drivers providing support for FreeBSD as a guest operating system on Microsoft Hyper-V.
- TRIM support for Solid State Drives has been added to ZFS.
- Support for the high-performance LZ4 compression algorithm has been added to ZFS.
Full details: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.0R/announce.html
As always, until the release announcement comes out, the release is not done. Until that time, there's always a possibility the release builds will need to be rebuilt for some reason.
The release notes will probably be https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.1R/relnotes.html - skimming through it reinforces that this is a minor release. There's fixes for security advisories, hardware driver updates and kernel tweaks.
I also enjoyed hetzner for a while and if I'd want a ZFS install I'd probably go with them as it's definitely very nice how they do it. But as I've just previously commented I found a slightly better price for my minimum needs with vultr.com (5$/per month) and ZFS is not important to me on this box.
there are also some freebsd images for AWS out there.
I also have freebsd vm's with crowncloud http://crowncloud.net/ and orangewebsite https://www.orangewebsite.com/vps.php
I've had a good experience with the last two. I chose them because they accept bitcoin (and orangewebsite is owned and operated in Iceland). If you go for some of the lesser known hosts, they will be flexible with what OS you want to use, especially if their platform is KVM based.