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June 5th, 2007 [by Doug Alder]
First let me say this post is not about whether Linux or Windows is better, both, when used properly by knowledgeable administrators, are excellent operating systems for servers.When we started selling (Virtual Private Server) plans we only offered Linux and we chose RedHat 7.3 as the OS then went to RedHat9. When RH9 reached end-of-life we switched to Fedora Core 1 (FC1) and followed that through to FC4 when we switched to . At all times we stuck with the most stable product. Stability is paramount because the amount of work required to maintain stability is always a consideration for sysadmins. Sticking with a single in offerings is also important for streamlining an operation.Control panel makers like , and always stay with the stable releases and because they need to wait until the release is stable before they upgrade their products they often appear to be be way behind current technology. Well yes they might be but again it is a matter of stability. Control panels are meant for production servers and as such you don’t put bleeding edge software on them, at least not if you want to retain your customers (or perhaps your job).If you need a server with the latest version of Apache (2.2.4 at time of writing), or the latest and greatest PHP (5.2.1) or MySQL (6.0 -Alpha) you need to get it without a control panel and install these items yourself. It will be a long time before the makers update their software to those versions and even then it will depend on the Linux distro as well.I have been asked a number of times why we dropped Fedora and went with CentOS. Well the reason is simple. Fedora has a 6 month life cycle and whether you have 10 servers or thousands of servers to maintain, trying to upgrade each one to the latest and greatest stable release every 6 months becomes Herculean task. For that reason, Fedora should not be used for production servers, it’s really a desktop Linux.
maintains any particular release of Fedora for a month after final release of the second following release. For example, Fedora 7 will be maintained until a month after Fedora 9 is released. Since new releases of Fedora occur approximately every 6 months, this translates into approximately 13 months of updates for every release. This schedule allows end users to optionally skip every other release and directly upgrade from Fedora N to Fedora N+2 release.
In short there is always a good reason for these decisions even if they are not obvious to a casual observer.
September 5th, 2007 at 5:01 am
It is good to see providers like Rackforce using more server friendly distribution like CentOs. For many years I have recommended clients to install more server friendly distributions to make their servers easier to maintain.