Debian vs Ubuntu vs CentOS?

Which One to Choose for Your Web Server?

  • CentOS

    Votes: 28 52.8%
  • Ubuntu

    Votes: 18 34.0%
  • Debian

    Votes: 7 13.2%
  • Fedora

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Other

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    53

Nirjonadda

Well-known member
Debian vs Ubuntu vs CentOS – Which One to Choose for Your Web Server? As we know both are famous and one of the best Linux distributions that come with their own set of pros and cons.
 
Years ago i used centos it was stable and had zero problems. Currently i use ubuntu on my web servers since it has the recent updates.
 
Use whichever one you prefer. All of the platforms are mature and work well. Some people like CentOS because you can use cPanel with it. Some folks prefer command lines.
 
I use CentOS 7 on my site. CentOS all the way. I've never tried any other distributions and are interested in learning about them to see what they are like but I never really want to risk anything I'm not familiar with so I always use CentOS.

Use whichever one you prefer. All of the platforms are mature and work well. Some people like CentOS because you can use cPanel with it. Some folks prefer command lines.

I can't imagine how difficult it would be to run a site from a command line only without a control panel. Some do it I know that but it must be so annoying without any type of user interface. I will also say that I'm starting to like virtualmin/webmin. I was a cPanel or go home type of guy for the longest time but I realized that virtualmin has more quality than I thought. For the extra price on VPS with cPanel as composed to a control panel that's free I found it worked well. Anyways I also didn't know you couldn't use cPanel on the other distributions either. That's new to me.
 
I don’t believe that cPanel is available on Debian-based distos (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.). You can get Plesk and other alternatives though. I had a VPS on 1&1 for XF test installs and used cPanel on CentOS7 there. But still it was too limiting in terms of options. So I went with Linode which was a HUGE open universe in comparison.



That said, I migrated my vB4 forum from 1&1 (managed/shared hosting) to XF 2.1 on a VPS running Ubuntu in March of last year. I had many options for distros and stacks at Linode (including CentOS) and specifically chose Ubuntu.

I administer it solely via command line. I really don’t even use phpMyAdmin (though I have it installed) for administering MySQL. @AndyB helped me develop a CLI-based database dump command that I now use as a nightly cron job

Sure the learning curve has been steep, but I’ve never learned so much in so short of a time about how Linux works and how to maintain and improve it.

From a new skills perspective it’s been an awesome ride. Nowadays, switching php versions, for example, via cPanel seems so quaint after I’ve learned to do the same thing via the command line using a2dismod and a2enmod. ;-)

Plus, I can upgrade individual modules and packages when I want to (for example going to php 7.4), not just when it becomes available on cPanel.
 

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Ubuntu does get pretty much daily upgrades and security patches to its various modules. It seems they are pretty good about staying on top of things. The next major (LTS) version of Ubuntu, 20.04, is due to be released toward the end of this month. This is a once-every-two-years type of release, and I try to stick with the LTS releases as they are supported far into the future.
 
Sorry for replying this old thread but I really want to curse RHEL.
I tried multiple times trying to convert my VPS from fresh-installed CentOS 8 to RHEL but all failed.
(My VPS provider doesn't support using self-supplied ISOs, and their ISO supply doesn't have RHEL.)
The conversion to OracleLinux and Almalinux are smooth, but Almalinux has compatibility issues with AAPanel + OracleLinux cannot show CJK characters in terminal (no way to resolve this issue after dozens of attempts).

Finally, I managed to convert CentOS Stream 8 to RHEL...
...but no account is able to be logged in after reboot. Phug me.


This full two-day bad experiences made me want to stay away from all rpm-based distros as far as I can.
Switching to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS now.
 
I guess I am in a a minority here - we exclusively use Debian.
In the past I've also used other distributions (mainly SUSE and Fedora), but found apt/dpkg to be superior to their package managers.

Can't say anything negative about Debian, it does run really stable for us.
 
I guess I am in a a minority here - we exclusively use Debian.
In the past I've also used other distributions (mainly SUSE and Fedora), but found apt/dpkg to be superior to their package managers.

Can't say anything negative about Debian, it does run really stable for us.
Debian Stable has support for no more than 5 years; Ubuntu LTS has 10 years of support.
I guess you can try Ubuntu once upon a time in the future.
 
Well after 2024 it's going to be something different than CentOS 7 since I doubt many will want to use CentOS Steam for production purposes. For me currently it's likely going to be whatever direction @eva2000 takes with centminmod for other distributions like Cloud Linux and such.
 
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