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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.
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.
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.
The thing is, every six months, all the versions of all the software changes. You have to audit and review your config from a-to-z for all the changes in the individual components, every six months, to make sure that the configuration setup is still appropriate.
With Debian, youre using old software, but that old software you can install once, and then patch it, and you are fine.
Not at all, for some situations. In the serious data center or enterprise support group, you're right - 6months is way too short. My group supports enterprise applications, and we only use RHEL because of the long product lifecycle.
But for some smaller departments who just want to set up a web site - quick - to display data or establish a shadow system that the enterprise folks don't want to support, I can see how Fedora is a good choice for them. The price tag is right, and it's quick to set up.
For personal web sites, I can also see how Fedora is a good choice. But not for hosting companies, for example.
I guess it all comes down to what you are going to do with it, and how "serious" you are about supporting the platform over the long-term.
I don't understand why people go and choose Fedora anyway.
Because they want RedHat, without the price tag that comes with RHEL-- which starts at $349 for a 2 CPU server, $1499 if you have 4 CPUs.
I'm not sure I could recommend RHEL or Fedora to many small shops. RHEL is expensive, Fedora is unstable.
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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.
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.