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Non-Red Hat Linux Hosting?

Posted by Cliff on from the for-those-who-prefer-spirals dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "Well, my web host is down again, so I thought I'd ask the Slashdot faithful if they can recommend any GNU/Linux based hosting sites (preferably virtual servers) running distributions besides Red Hat. I know this has been covered in the past, but it seems everyone uses Red Hat, and I'm a Debian type person. Anyone out there have a host they can recommend?"

5 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Does it really matter? by OutRigged · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I know there are differences between the two distros, but are there any differences that warrant a preference over one or the other? Is Debian faster performance wise, compared to Redhat?

    Or is this a whole matter of personal preference?

    --
    RaGe
    We're all just noise on the wires..
    1. Re:Does it really matter? by m0rph3us0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Of course it matters, OS determines what kind of things you can do on your page. The distribution and testing that goes into the distribution determines how stable it will be, as far as I can see Debian has lot more stringent guidelines for stability then Red Hat, compare version numbers in Debian 3.0 to Red Hat 7.3, Red Hat contains alot newer code, which means generally more unstable.Personally, I provide my clients with OpenBSD when they do not have a preference.

  2. Not the distro by mnordstr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Well, my web host is down again"

    It's not the distro that's failing, it's either the sysadmin or the network. (or perhaps the hardware)

  3. It's all about the apt-get MAN! by Vodak · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It could very well be your web hosting company's system administrators not doing their job. It could be some little script kiddie playing bad games on your hosting company. It could even be your ISP that won't let you connect to your host. All of these things have nothing to do with it being Redhat or not.

    Why choose Debian over Redhat? does it give you some nifty little feature? Hell yeah. apt-get r0x. Should your hosting company install Debian over Redhat simply because it has apt-get? HELL NO

  4. Yes it does. by oli_freyr · · Score: 2, Insightful

    We got bit in the behind a few weeks ago. Red Hat decided that it was a good idea to close a recent security hole in PHP by upgrading the PHP packages in 7.2 from 4.0.6 -> 4.1.2.
    The only problem was that some of our customers were using custom modules for PHP. For them the upgrade was time consuming (costly) and happened later than necessary.

    Right now there is a memory leak in the PHP 4.1.2 packages from RH due to shared memory not being released, and the QA people have been letting it sit there for a whole month!!
    The result will probably be that they introduce PHP 4.2.2 as a fix...

    I've been using Debian at home for 4 years now, and I think their security team does an excellent job! Especially wrt not upgrading a package version unless it is absolutely necessary. (Then they dropped the ball with SSH a few weeks ago. ;)

    The net result is that we are considering a move from RH to Debian so we will get better bugfix handling as well as better overall quality of the packages. If we need bleeding edge software we can in most cases fetch the source package from unstable and compile it for woody... (that's what i've done on my home workstation).

    <plug severity="shameless">
    You can visit our website at http://www.rackserv.com.
    (Sorry, danish only since our target is the danish hosting market :-/)
    </plug>