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>From: Raleigh Guevarra
[mailto:deathect@yahoo.com] > [snip] >Why did you chose Debian over CentOS to host dozens of
websites? [snip] I /really/ like CentOS. However, I choose Debian over CentOS
for a few reasons. Apt. YUM is getting better but I hit dependency hell only a
few months ago with it. No admin should /ever/ deal with that. Package caching. When you have dozens of servers, blindly
doing updates is a bad idea but updating individually can be near impossible.
Setting up a package repository so that packages you want get updated when you
want them to is something that ‘unnamed north American vendors’
make you pay for and it isn’t the easiest of tasks in CentOS. It is
trivial w/ Debian (I am aware of at _least_
two guides being written and commented on within this mailing list within the
last 6 months). A side bonus to this, instead of pulling X MB of data for each
update on each server and wasting bandwidth, a Debian package cacher pulls once
and shares with the rest. I personally have not found a solid way of doing this
within the YUM/RPM world. An extra side bonus, which is faster your bandwidth
or your network speed? Having 30+ servers pull X MB from the internet, or one
pulling from the internet and the rest pulling over the network? I love my
package cacher. J Smaller install base. The last thing you need on a production
server is a bunch of unneeded packages. Fewer packages means less updates, less
things to break, and more time for you to do productive tasks. Flexibility and recovery. You really have to plan for things
to go wrong. Bad drives, bad motherboard, bad whatever you will come into work
one day with a server down (hopefully you have planned this in advance and your
users will never know). Debian is much more flexible in my opinion when it
comes to dealing with outages, backups, and recovery. Combine the above
mentioned package cacher and a good backup of data and I can do (have done and
will do) /a complete production ready/ rebuild on a completely different system
in sub 15 minutes. That is base install, all updates, all software, and ready
to go with the users never knowing they were on a different system. While I can
do most of the same things with CentOS, I just have not ever been able to get the
installer and updates that fast. My average time still sits between 35-40
minutes for a fresh rebuild of CentOS. Maybe 30 minutes isn’t a big deal
for you, but it has been for me. Stable. The fact people joke and make fun of how stable
Debian is a testament to the devs who make certain that Debian stable _is_ stable! Anyway, that is my 2 cents. Have fun! ~Stack~ |