CentOS - Sep 2007 - Why CentOS as a webhosting platform

Hi,

CentOS seems to be doing really well in the hosting business these days, and 
even for people who would normally have used Windows or OSX on the hosting 
previously, are now looking at using CentOS. And I thought it would be nice to 
have a section on the wiki about exactly why that is.

Not having any direct connection with the hosting business I was wondering if 
people here could help me out a bit and let me know why they think CentOS is 
good / bad as a platform in this market segment.

I suppose that would include dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, Shared / Virtual 
hosting, and even high performance grid hosting that a few people seem to be 
offering these days.

Once we have some material here in this thread, everything will go online at the
wiki ( with due credit to all contributors ).

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq

From: centos-bounces at centos.org 
[mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf Of Karanbir
Singh
> 
> Hi,
> 
> CentOS seems to be doing really well in the hosting business 
> these days, and 
> even for people who would normally have used Windows or OSX 
> on the hosting 
> previously, are now looking at using CentOS. And I thought it 
> would be nice to 
> have a section on the wiki about exactly why that is.
> 
> Not having any direct connection with the hosting business I 
> was wondering if 
> people here could help me out a bit and let me know why they 
> think CentOS is 
> good / bad as a platform in this market segment.
> 
> I suppose that would include dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, 
> Shared / Virtual 
> hosting, and even high performance grid hosting that a few 
> people seem to be 
> offering these days.
> 
> Once we have some material here in this thread, everything 
> will go online at the 
> wiki ( with due credit to all contributors ).
I would assume it is because of the cost.

Most large-scale and small-scale web hosting are looking to drive costs
down, so are more willing to choose an OS that carries the least cost
overhead.

Why buy support for 1000 servers when each are identically configured?

Why not just buy support for 10 web-development/testing servers that
mirror the production servers and if an OS problem creeps up it should
be reproducable on the supported development/testing environment which
can then utilize the commercial support?

Cost is the first place I would look.

-Ross

______________________________________________________________________
This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by
the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged
and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient
of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination,
distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto,
is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error,
please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the
original and any copy or printout thereof.

For me it doesn't have to do with cost.  It has to do with I've used
RedHat Linux since 1995, then RHEL, then CentOS.  And all this time
I've used some form of RedHat or derivative on all my servers.  I
prefer to stick with what I know.

Also, you'll notice that the majority of pre-packed Control Panel
software is written for RPM based distro's.

And if you're looking for webhosting, go to www.cyberbite.com

-matt


On 9/6/07, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> CentOS seems to be doing really well in the hosting business these days,
and
> even for people who would normally have used Windows or OSX on the hosting
> previously, are now looking at using CentOS. And I thought it would be nice
to
> have a section on the wiki about exactly why that is.
>
> Not having any direct connection with the hosting business I was wondering
if
> people here could help me out a bit and let me know why they think CentOS
is
> good / bad as a platform in this market segment.
>
> I suppose that would include dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, Shared /
Virtual
> hosting, and even high performance grid hosting that a few people seem to
be
> offering these days.
>
> Once we have some material here in this thread, everything will go online
at the
> wiki ( with due credit to all contributors ).
>
> --
> Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>

From: "Karanbir Singh" <mail-lists at
karan.org>
> CentOS seems to be doing really well in the hosting business these days, 
> and even for people who would normally have used Windows or OSX on the 
> hosting previously, are now looking at using CentOS. And I thought it 
> would be nice to have a section on the wiki about exactly why that is.
For me that was the bad choice of the FC family. The biggest part, CentOS 
has a bigger life time then the crappy FC (6 months).

Danny.

CentOS is doing well in the webhosting business for the same reason  
"the upstream provider" is doing well in the enterprise data center.
Webhosting companies have recognized the low TCO CentOS brings to the  
table, as well as it's binary compatibility with RHEL and the benefits  
that come with.  Having an enterprise Linux distro as your hosting  
platform gives you confidence and piece of mind with regards to  
security and errata fixes for the better part of a decade.  I no  
longer have to reinstall Fedora every 6 months to keep my servers (and  
clients) secure.  An Enterprise distro also brings stability and ease  
of maintenance to the table.

The popularity of RHEL in the corporate world makes CentOS a  
no-brainer in the dedicated server market, which tends to be more  
price-conscious and volatile.  This market also tends to cater to the  
advanced linux user, whether that be a linux professional or serious  
hobbyist.

With the advent of CentOS 5.x, a VPS can benefit from all the points  
I've already made, again making CentOS a perfect candidate in the VPS  
market with no [or little] customization.

Webhosting companies are businesses.  TCO is a prime concern and  
consideration which makes enterprise distributions attractive.  A  
proven *free* enterprise distro is obviously a perfect fit.


Regards,
Kenneth Price

> Hi,
>
> CentOS seems to be doing really well in the hosting business these
> days, and even for people who would normally have used Windows or OSX
> on the hosting previously, are now looking at using CentOS. And I
> thought it would be nice to have a section on the wiki about exactly
> why that is.
>
> Not having any direct connection with the hosting business I was
> wondering if people here could help me out a bit and let me know why
> they think CentOS is good / bad as a platform in this market segment.
>
> I suppose that would include dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, Shared /
> Virtual hosting, and even high performance grid hosting that a few
> people seem to be offering these days.
>
> Once we have some material here in this thread, everything will go
> online at the wiki ( with due credit to all contributors ).
>
> -- 
> Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq

Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Hi,
>
> CentOS seems to be doing really well in the hosting business these
> days, and even for people who would normally have used Windows or OSX
> on the hosting previously, are now looking at using CentOS. And I
> thought it would be nice to have a section on the wiki about exactly
> why that is.
>
> Not having any direct connection with the hosting business I was
> wondering if people here could help me out a bit and let me know why
> they think CentOS is good / bad as a platform in this market segment.
>
> I suppose that would include dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, Shared /
> Virtual hosting, and even high performance grid hosting that a few
> people seem to be offering these days.
>
> Once we have some material here in this thread, everything will go
> online at the wiki ( with due credit to all contributors ).
>
As a web host, I'm gearing all 'soon-to-be-launched' systems to
CentOS
for many reasons.  The first was mentioned in this thread: most CP
applications for hosting are based around RPM-friendly distros.  The
second is actually /most/ important to me and it isn't cost.  It's this
list and the CentOS community.  The community support for CentOS is as
good /if not better/ than that of Upstream or any other OS's I've used
over the past 10 years.

The distro is solid, has longevity and is robust.  Sounds like a win-win
to me and that's why we are migrating *all* of our systems to CentOS.

~Ray

*tongue in cheek: for additional comments in the typical US$0.02
intervals, feel free to contact me*

Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Hi,
>
> CentOS seems to be doing really well in the hosting business these 
> days, and even for people who would normally have used Windows or OSX 
> on the hosting previously, are now looking at using CentOS. And I 
> thought it would be nice to have a section on the wiki about exactly 
> why that is.
>
> Not having any direct connection with the hosting business I was 
> wondering if people here could help me out a bit and let me know why 
> they think CentOS is good / bad as a platform in this market segment.
>
> I suppose that would include dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, Shared / 
> Virtual hosting, and even high performance grid hosting that a few 
> people seem to be offering these days.
>
> Once we have some material here in this thread, everything will go 
> online at the wiki ( with due credit to all contributors ).
>
For us the bottom line was we have been a RedHat shop since the release 
of 5.2. The proven reliability of packages and updates have made our 
lives better. Only rarely over this time has anything broken due to an 
update. All through this time, every package needed to run a quality 
webserver has been available, allowing us to stay within the upstream's 
packages. Keeping up with security updates has been a breeze.

Adding in quality repositories, such as Dag's has also been pretty 
darned reliable and given us almost everything else we wanted to 
complete our basic systems.

In a nutshell, very few surprises therefore reliability and quality of 
service.

Yes, we have lived with older systems, like the slow migration to new 
versions of mysql for instance. But the tradeoff has kept us away from 
bleeding edge.... and I hate 'bleeding' over a busted web service.

So much is interrelated, mail systems, libraries, and on and on... 
Something can literally be broken for some time before someone makes you 
aware of it. I do remember one upgrade to mysql years ago which broke 
any ability to access it via a client side application. Who tests this 
sort of thing while doing upgrades/updates? Well, generally RedHat does 
a pretty darned good job of it, but they did mess up this one security 
release which was rolled out pretty quickly. What I'm getting at is a 
sysadmin really cannot test every possible way each bit of web related 
software is going to be used. It takes a bigger community.

As for CentOS. We did hold subscriptions with Redhat for our systems up 
until the time the rates increased. Their model was better suited to the 
corporate world, where one very fast very expensive server takes care of 
the enterprise. Licensing in that situation is cheap. For us, webservers 
don't need to be all that fast and we get a lot of mileage out of them. 
For instance, we have three older machines which are run almost purely 
as nameservers. Hard to justify the licensing for those. Heck, one 
license cost more than what one of those servers is worth these days.

We do find that splitting out some services across servers while 
combining some services on some servers is a good business model for us. 
The downside is we run a lot of servers. Licensing was going to cost 
somewhere between 10 and 20% of our gross. Hosting is a fairly 
competitive market. To best compete with other providers we needed a 
different solution. Other quality solutions exist such as Debian and we 
were about to go that route when Whitebox arrived. Shortly after the 
more active CentOS community came to life. I've been extremely happy 
with the decision to go with CentOS for almost all of our production 
systems. We do also run some Debian boxes, particularly due to its 
cleaner interaction with various java products.

We have never given more than just a thought from time to time about a 
Windows based server. Yes there are tempting features, but you all know 
the advantages to a 'nix based system.

This would also be a good time for me to again sincerely thank everyone 
involved with CentOS. A special thanks to the maintainers, but also a 
thanks to all of those on this list. Cumulatively we have made a more 
robust end product for the upstream all the way down to better systems 
for all of us running CentOS. It truly is a 'C'ommunity
'ent'erprise
'O'perating 'S'ystem!

I do wish there were more varied mailing list for CentOS. The general 
list is great but is fairly busy. I have often times thought that a 
CentOS hosting/webserver mailing list could be a great asset to those of 
us in this particular facet of operation. It would allow for more 
discussion of spam filtering, mailservers, bind, admin interfaces, 
backups, etc. Items that could so easily take over the general 
discussion list, which is not really the place for it. I do commend the 
creation of the mailing list for virtualization, as I'm sure that will 
become a hot topic.

Best,
John Hinton
http://ew3d.com
EW3D/SuperStatZ

On 06 September 2007, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>
wrote:
> 
> CentOS seems to be doing really well in the hosting business these
> days, and even for people who would normally have used Windows or OSX
> on the hosting previously, are now looking at using CentOS. And I
> thought it would be nice to have a section on the wiki about exactly
> why that is.
> 
Another question is why not to use CentOS. My web hosting ISP (OLM)
doesn't use it. I can't imagine why not. It would seem to be more stable
and have a longer life, etc. I would prefer they use CentOS, but, my web
sites are on shared hosting.