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I am in a dilemma. I am about to have a dedicated hosting server from godaddy over there they are providing selection of linux CentOS and Fedora.

Actually I don't know what to select and proceed further.

My concerns are, security and ease of use.

Would anybody suggest me!! whats the best to a newbie stupid.

Thanks SIA

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    Personally I would not recommend GoDaddy for Linux hosting regardless of distro, but it's been several years since I tried that. Maybe their dedicated offering is better than the virtual offering I was using.
    – Joe Holloway
    Feb 25, 2010 at 14:03
  • Caveat emptor Always be suspicious of anything heavily marketed.
    – Paul
    Feb 25, 2010 at 15:49
  • Just having two choices does not make a dilemma. Wikipedia, for instance, says that both choices should be unacceptable. In common usage, you usually need a potential tragedy or some element of drama. Godaddy might be that bad :) or it might not.
    – Paul
    Feb 25, 2010 at 18:06

3 Answers 3

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Both are RPM-based and as you are likely to only get shell access anyway both will be as easy to use as each other.

In terms of security, CentOS tends to use older packages which obviously have the benefit of having been out in the wild long enough to have key security holes plugged.

However, the biggest security issues are likely to be in the application-specific configuration of your server processes like Apache, MySQL, SMTP etc where it doesn't really matter which OS you choose.

The downside of CentOS is the packages may be too old for what you need (e.g. I had problems with the version of PHP offered). You can go off-piste and compile/install your own packages but that's an additional layer of hassle and dependency chasing to consider.

The downside of Fedora is a more bleeding-edge approach to packages which may mean less stability long-term.

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  • We use Redhat / CentOS and had to compile our PHP installs. Other than that this is spot on. I would choose CentOS over Fedora any day, for servers.
    – steve.lippert
    Feb 25, 2010 at 18:54
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I use Ubuntu Server where possible, however if that's not an option then I'd use CentOS. It's based on Red Hat's enterprise operating system, so stability and security should be a higher focus than Fedora.

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There are two questions here: (1) where should you go for hosting; (2) what O/S should you use.

For (1) I would recommend Linode if you are looking at VPS solutions. Performance is superior to some of the other VPS out there, and it is easy to add or subtract machines from your account or switch linux distributions.

For(2) I would repeat Paolo's caution that it is the applications which often make the server insecure. Try typing '; blah into the forms of some of your web applications and if you get a bad page this can be a sign of SQL injection vulnerability. In addition to looking out for bad coding, it is important to keep your server updated. You should pick a distribution where you know if it is updated, and how to keep it updated without relying on anyone else. It is easy to do that in Ubuntu, but also easy in some other distributions too.

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