Debian vs CentOS for a server

Posted on June 10, 2013

Hi everyone,

I wanted to ask about the pros and cons of Debian vs. CentOS for a server. I’ve been using shared hosting for years, but I’ve finally been pushed to a VPS for the first time. So for the first time I need to make some decisions about a server OS. I’ve been using Linux for many years on the desktop, and I’m most familiar with Debian and openSUSE in that context. But I have no idea what to look for in a good server. In my research, it’s obvious that CentOS receives support for a much longer time than Debian, and it comes from the wildly successful RHEL. But Debian is also a very serious distribution with a huge community and package repository. But I’m not sure if the relatively short 3 or 4 year support cycle is long enough for me. And for general administration and ease of maintenance and of course stability and security, what have your experiences been?

Thanks a lot!

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Franklin Yu

February 7, 2018

If it’s a VPS for enterprise, and you expect the enterprise to grow (even slowly), go for CentOS. You can switch to RHEL when you can afford it, and they provide true enterprise-level support. They even handle the transition for you. You have 10 years (lifetime of a CentOS release) to prepare for the switch.

If it’s your own VPS, or it’s for a non-profit organization, then go for Debian. You need to upgrade every 2 or 3 years, but it is not very painful (according to this blog). Upgrading Debian through SSH should not be risky. Debian is stable enough for free distributions, and I uses it in my VPS.

fredrikung

April 8, 2014

When it comes to documentation, nothing beats CentOS. If you need tutorials/guides for something, you’re almost sure to find it for CentOS and not always for Debain. But debian is simpler in terms of configuration files, especially since you’re used to ubuntu.