Improving a Hosting Environment: 2. Choosing a Linux Distro

Hearing Linux experts talk about their favorite distro's reminds me of the scene in "Life of Brian" when it becomes clear that to the resistance, the only thing worse than the Romans is the Judean Peoples Front (or is that the People's Front of Judea?!). If only they spent as much time evangelizing Linux compared to Windows I'm sure Microsoft would have something to worry about!

There are clearly many subtle and arcane benefits of various families and distributions of Linux, but our needs for a web server are fairly simple. We decided to focus on a server optimized distro (I'm sure Ubuntu does a great job of running a web server, but most data center experts have more experience in RHEL or Debian for running web apps). Security wasn't an overriding concern, so we didn't feel the slower release cycle of an option like SecureBSD was worth the extra security it tries to provide (for a firewall on the other hand, SecureBSD might be a great choice).

On the other hand, we weren't looking for a cutting edge distro - we want to be running the servers - not playing with them and we're likely to always be a bit behind the bleeding edge in the applications and versions we choose to run. We ruled out commercial distributions as w felt we could get the support we needed from our "server guy" and we wanted a distro that was ubiquitous so that it wouldn't be hard to find people capable of working on or advising on the servers over time.

We also wanted to have a decent package manager for simplifying updates to keep our lives easier, and did NOT want one of the minimalist "build your own" distro's. In theory they are great as you can customize each server, running only the code you need and you have a great deal of control over what you run. We saw them as a maintenance nightmare as it would take substantially more time to create a configuration and then the extra effort of training up each new person on our custom setup or trying to solve problems with a configuration that is basically unique to us just didn't seem worth the extra control and tighter security footprint. If we had a full time Linux server admin we might have made a different decision, but I doubt it.

So, our requirements were:

• Server rather than desktop optimized
• Security not the only concern
• Goldilocks updates - not too many, not too few
• Non-commercial (no licensing/support fees)
• Ubiquitous
• Decent package manager
• Not "build your own"

In the end we chose CentOS. It is an unbadged version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux meaning that anyone familiar with RHEL will be able to use CentOS, making it an extremely popular distro (if you add up RHEL plus CentOS penetration) while still meeting all of our other requirements. I'm sure that there would have been plenty of other equally good or possibly better choices, but this didn't seem to be a bad selection and we wanted to move on to focus on decisions that would have a greater impact on our business success.

Any thoughts?