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Big Gains for Fedora in Web Hosting
1sockchuck writes "Fedora is the fastest-growing Linux distribution for web sites, according to new data from Netcraft on the popularity of Linux distros. Red Hat continues to be the most widely-used distro, running twice as many sites as Debian. 'Red Hat seems to have the best of both worlds at the moment: market-leading status for Red Hat Linux, plus the fastest-growing community distribution in Fedora,' the analysis notes."
I am always wondering why isn't there a viable open source variant of web hosting automation software like CPanel, Plesk, Ensim etc.
That RedHat lost 1.2%, and the Debian, SuSE, and Cobalt still each host more sites than Fedora.
It would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name
Fedora as a desktop distribution is one thing, but after running Fedora Core 1 on my linode web server, I will never run fedora on a server again. A 6 month lifespan is simply way too short. From now on I'll be using CentOS on my linode. In fact, for desktop machines I'd even considuer CentOS since the lifespan of CentOS is 5 years or so.
So I can believe that RHEL or a RHEL compatible distro would be increasing in popularity, but I have a hard time believing Fedora would be appropriate for such situations.
Netcraft doesn't look at Ubuntu's stats. It's been rising like crazy over the past year, poking its head up to the top of DistroWatch's average hits/day list for the last 3 months and last month. As to the last 6 months (netcraft looks at this period), Mandrake seems to have the top seat.
Looking at percentage increase, Ubuntu probably beats the pants off of Fedora, rising from an average hits/day of 300 in 2004 to an average hits/day of 1916 in the past month; that's a 638% increase. Using the same math for Fedora, we see a LOSS of 8%.
Of course, this is just a measure of people's interest in DistroWatch's stats on distros ... far from complete. However, it shows that increase in Ubuntu is massive. Perhaps bigger than Fedora. Then again, both are very young and very successful; a massive percentage increase should be expected.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I dunno about Fedora, but what I *am* pretty sure of is that I don't want to know what happened to Chuck's other sock...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Besides Red Hat Linux starting to lose market share to Fedora (more of a change of name than a loss), it looks like Fedora is the distro of choice for new web servers, closely followed by Debian. This doesn't seem like a big surprise to me, but it's always good to see numbers. Would be more interesting to see this in context of all OSes however.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Fedora is the fastest growing distro because its converting people that wouldn't normally run a linux server with its ease of setup and install. When these people running fedora servers get more experiance with linux, they will learn there are much better distro's to run a server on then fedora.
Also nice to see apache still holding on against MS...
#include "coucou.h"
Fedora is not "a natural upgrade of Redhat". It is the free, community developed core that RedHat is based on.
... or OpenOffice is to StarOffice.
Fedora is to RedHat as Mozilla is to Netscape
What this tells us, is that there are plenty of people who run web servers and like RedHat but don't want to pay for it.
It's got a what, 6, 7-month release cycle, and maybe 16 for updates. After that it changes radically, and you'd be breaking a bunch of stuff every year or more, just to keep yourself safe from exploits. Not to mention that its bleeding-edge nature keeps it from being all that stable anyway. (It's ok but far from others.)
If people want to use Red Hat on a server (which RH distros can accomplish very well), they should be using RHEL or one of the clones. Those are set up for that, and are marketed as such. I don't understand why people go and choose Fedora anyway.
Fedora is the basic RedHat-without-the-cost installation, and has very little going for it in the server space, other than being free and easy. The one thing it does have, however, is support from other applications.
Other than providing an RPM installation mechanism (and thus supporting software distributed via RPM) and being based off of RedHat (and thus working well with e.g. Oracle), it has one major benefit in the hosting market: control panels.
Popular webhosting services (I use Serverbeach as an example because I've dealt with them and know their URL offhand) offer, generally speaking, Redhat, and as such, the administration control panels available have generally targeted RedHat. ServerBeach now offers Debian servers, but as of yet, does not offer Plesk, Ensim, or CPanel on these servers, because they are not supported.
As such, when a user goes to a company like ServerBeach and wants a control panel, they have to choose Fedora as their option in order to get it. That being said, things in that realm are changing.
Firstly, I noticed that Plesk has Debian 3.1 support coming out in March. At that point, Plesk will be available on servers running Debian (such as those ServerBeach provides). Additionally, cPanel is working on support for Debian 3.0 (which will be easily ported to 3.1, likely with no changes) which is currently in beta. Ensim, from what I can tell, has no plans to support Debian, though for all I know it could be announced tomorrow.
Once the popular control panels are available with Debian, then it will be easier for all-Debian companies like my own to use and promote Debian in our hosting environments. The ease-of-management provided by e.g. Plesk, along with the ease-of-maintenance and upgrading (not to mention longevity) provided by Debian. How could it go wrong?
And since Ubuntu is so similar to Debian, it wouldn't be hard for these manufacturers to support that as well, giving it a boost too.
Things are looking good for Debian.
...that people hitting distrowatch are interested in trying out new stuff for fun,. or are dissatisfied with whatever they are currently running. However, people who are satisifed with what they have, would have not as much interest in going window shopping, hence, wouldn't be going over to distrowatch.
Just a SWAG.
Budget at least several hours sys admin work per server you manage each time a new version comes out to perform the upgrade.
Allow for the odd issue to creep in. e.g. pre-existing functionality not working, or not working the same.
And add in a bit of hair loss for the odd problem that crops up during the new distro upgrade. e.g. FC2->FC3 introduced udev which seems to cause the odd hassle.
So, if you are 'hosting' with a distro that changes every several months, then be prepared for the extra work.
We offer a choice of distros for our VPSs. And some advice on choosing between them.
We recommend people use Fedora if they like the latest versions of software and want to upgrade their software frequently. If follows that if you are running a hosting operation where you don't want to interrupt/change a working setup then FC is probably not the right distro for you.
We recommend WBEL if they want an enterprise distribution that is stable, widely supported and will have updated RPMs for fix bugs and security issues for the next several years. WBEL is derived from RHEL sources. WBEL alternatives include CentOS. Or rpmbuild --rebuild your own (just got a few udpates SRPMS to go on my own RHEL4 recompile...).
We recommend Debian for people that prefer it. i.e. if you are familiar with Debian then you'll know whether it suits you or not. If you are not familiar with debian then you'll probably find things 'easier' on a RedHat based distro.
--
Which distro do you want on your shiny new VPS?
A web server is just a stripped system with a kernel and enough userland to run Apache or whatever and PHP/JSP/Perl/Etc. The distro is irrelevant, more or less.
The sole reason Fedora started to make a gain is because Redhat wanted to start charging for its OS. All those people who were using Redhat for free and getting updates suddenly found themselves without a free OS with updates. What people did is go to Fedora because it was similiar in nature to the last Redhat version (9.0).
Fedora Core 1 did not majorly break any software and worked with major control panels without too much porting. What has happened recently is that the Core 2 and more recently Core 3 aren't as stable. For example cPanel (a popular control panel) does not support Core 3 due to the SELinux complications. This is trend which you will see Fedora taper off.
The other reason why Fedora will taper off is that people have a lot of problems with it. You can login to any major webhosting forum and see problems people are having with Fedora. What the general recommendation is to do is go to CentOS. CentOS is a copyright free build of Redhat ES. (Basically the developers of CentOS take the source builds of Redhat ES and strip out the copyrighted logos, etc. and then build from there.) CentOS is a free version of Redhat ES. Why anyone uses Fedora when they can have a stable version of Redhat ES is a wonder. Over time you will see CentOS make a large jump in the survey (if netcraft can determine the difference).
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