Fedora 6 vs SUSE 10.1 vs DEBIAN 4 vs Fedora 4?

stulee · 08-03-08

My new hosting gives me the option of any of the above. I'll be running some hopefully successful blogs and the like but not running ecommerce or anything like that. Anyone have any opinions on which might be most suitable from a security and compatibility with Wordpress etc. point of view?

Cheers,

Stuart

Jack Russell · 08-03-08

Centos 5 is missing IMO. CentoS is compatible with cPanel and best for wordpress blogs.

mainlime · 08-03-08

Well neither of those Fedora distributions are supported any more so you won't get any security updates. Are you sure they mean Fedora 4 and not CentOS or RHEL 4?

Is this shared hosting, dedicated or VPS? If you have full control of the machine, some Linux experience and a good chunk of luck you can upgrade a Fedora 6 installation to 7 and then 8 from the command line.

Given those four choices, I'd probably ask why Fedora 7 or 8 isn't available first, but failing that go for Debian.

If it's shared hosting or has something like CPanel or Webmin installed you won't really notice any difference which version of Linux is installed for something as straightforward as Wordpress.

stulee · 08-03-08

Thanks Mainlime.

I should have said - it's a VPS service which offers various images. Thought I'd ask which might be best before plumping for one of them. If as you say, it doesn't make much difference, then I'll leave it as is.

Thanks Jack, I'll consider your centOS hosting if I ever upgrade to something a bit better and pricier.

mainlime · 08-03-08

Out of interest, which VPS is it?

tbp · 09-03-08

Having used Redhat for many years, I`m a bit fan of fedora.

It works well, theres a huge amount of support for it, and you don't get some of the technical oddities you get with other versions of linux, its pretty straightforward.

You definately want to go for 6 over 4, as it comes with later versions of programs like PHP and MySQL which have more features, but more importantly more security patches.

As the others have said, i`m suprised that they aren't offering later versions of Fedora though.

A lot of hosting companies run quite a bit behind though, when they get a system working they don't want to change it and stick with it for years. A lot of hosts still only offer PHP 4, which is well out of date now. It does takes a lot of work for them to upgrade to a new OS, as they have to do a lot of testing, train up all their staff etc. But a truly good hosting company will do this, and it gives a real indication of how good they are as a host.

When it comes down to it though, it depends on your own skills. If you don't use linux through the command line, add new software, keep upgrading to the latest versions etc, it doesn't really make much difference what OS you go with. At standard level, ie just uploading files to the web server to display them on the net, they are all pretty similar. It's only when you want to do more that need to take into account the individual differences. The latest versions do offer the highest security though, as age old holes are plugged.