Hello, I would like to know which of the following distros is better for a VPS with 256 MB ram and 1 GHZ Processor, which will be used as a web server; and why. I need stability and low resource usage. 1. CentOS 4 or 5 2. Debian 4 or 5 3. Ubuntu 9.04 4. Fedora 10 or 11 5. Gentoo 32 bit Thanks! (P.S. I know that a similar question was asked before, but not for SMALL VPS's.)
I would use Debian with Lighttpd, PHP5 and an optimized my.cnf. I believe a good one can be found on lowendbox.com
256 megs of RAM isn't that small. I recommend Ubuntu. It's the standard linux distro at this point. Debian is great and all, but they don't update their software repositories enough. I've ran Ubuntu on a 256 meg VPS for years with no problems. Was able to run apache, PHP, and mySQL with no problems.
Consider, Gentoo is the a stable distro of linux and is very much small.. but need to know how it work. Debian is not very small but is very easy to use.. CentOS is the est equilibre. Is compatible to all control panel and is stable/small distro. The best way is to install FreeBSD, but unluckly there are not in the options. FreeBSD is small, very secure, very stable.. and have same function + than linux. i like it
I'd encourage you to do as small of an installation as you possibly can, taking note as to remove as many programs running upon start up as possible, as that will have a huge impact upon your experience. For the best result, do a "custom" installation to edit the packages, then proceed to manually edit the programs that run on start up (you can use the "setup" command to do this, from the command prompt) For example, even when doing a server based installation, CentOS will proceed to load the Bluetooth networking components. This will chew up CPU and memory, on a small (256MB) server, this will cause a server to run out of RAM much quicker and swap to disk, equating to horrid performance. While CentOS is my favorite distribution (and the most popular one on the market), and I recommend it, more important than the distribution itself is the configuration of it. Good luck! John C. Young
I'm partial to Debian. I really appreciate apt, it's true some of the packages are a little out of date but that helps make it very stable.