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Red Hat Software Businesses Software Linux

Big Gains for Fedora in Web Hosting 36

Posted by timothy from the it's-the-eye-shade-power dept.
1sockchuck writes "Fedora is the fastest-growing Linux distribution for web sites, according to new data from Netcraft on the popularity of Linux distros. Red Hat continues to be the most widely-used distro, running twice as many sites as Debian. 'Red Hat seems to have the best of both worlds at the moment: market-leading status for Red Hat Linux, plus the fastest-growing community distribution in Fedora,' the analysis notes."
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Big Gains for Fedora in Web Hosting More

Big Gains for Fedora in Web Hosting

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  • CPanel, Plesk, Ensim etc. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I am always wondering why isn't there a viable open source variant of web hosting automation software like CPanel, Plesk, Ensim etc.
  • That RedHat lost 1.2%, and the Debian, SuSE, and Cobalt still each host more sites than Fedora.
    • not to sound like a scoffer, but what is fedora beyond a natural upgrade of Redhat? Sun did something like that when they stopped calling it 2.x and calling it Solaris 7 8 9 and 10. I doubt I am the first to call FUD on the fedora name. At least with Sun switching off SUNos to Solaris they did make a major revision in moving out of BSD and over to System V.

      What I am getting at is that Redhat and Fedora should be counted as the same OS. Can we please have a courtesy flush on that marketing?

      • Fedora is not "a natural upgrade of Redhat". It is the free, community developed core that RedHat is based on.

        Fedora is to RedHat as Mozilla is to Netscape ... or OpenOffice is to StarOffice.

        What this tells us, is that there are plenty of people who run web servers and like RedHat but don't want to pay for it.
        • So when did the folks over at Fedora go back in time to become the basis of the OS they are an offshoot of? While I will grant you that RH/Fedora is pretty popular I will stick to SuSE.
        • Fedora up to this point is NOT community developed.

          Calling it a public beta would be more on target.

          Now, Redhat has said from the start they would get the community involved, but have yet to deliver. So far all development is Redhat driven.
  • Fedora as a desktop distribution is one thing, but after running Fedora Core 1 on my linode web server, I will never run fedora on a server again. A 6 month lifespan is simply way too short. From now on I'll be using CentOS on my linode. In fact, for desktop machines I'd even considuer CentOS since the lifespan of CentOS is 5 years or so.

    So I can believe that RHEL or a RHEL compatible distro would be increasing in popularity, but I have a hard time believing Fedora would be appropriate for such situatio

    • ... I will never run fedora on a server again. A 6 month lifespan is simply way too short ...

      Not at all, for some situations. In the serious data center or enterprise support group, you're right - 6months is way too short. My group supports enterprise applications, and we only use RHEL because of the long product lifecycle.

      But for some smaller departments who just want to set up a web site - quick - to display data or establish a shadow system that the enterprise folks don't want to support, I can

  • DistroWatch sites Ubuntu as #1 rising distro (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Khopesh ( 112447 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @05:04PM (#11936533) Homepage Journal

    Netcraft doesn't look at Ubuntu [ubuntulinux.org]'s stats. It's been rising like crazy over the past year, poking its head up to the top of DistroWatch [distrowatch.com]'s average hits/day list for the last 3 months and last month. As to the last 6 months (netcraft looks at this period), Mandrake [mandrakelinux.com] seems to have the top seat.

    Looking at percentage increase, Ubuntu probably beats the pants off of Fedora, rising from an average hits/day of 300 in 2004 to an average hits/day of 1916 in the past month; that's a 638% increase. Using the same math for Fedora, we see a LOSS of 8%.

    Of course, this is just a measure of people's interest in DistroWatch's stats on distros ... far from complete. However, it shows that increase in Ubuntu is massive. Perhaps bigger than Fedora. Then again, both are very young and very successful; a massive percentage increase should be expected.

    • Re:DistroWatch sites Ubuntu as #1 rising distro (Score:5, Funny)

      by Otter ( 3800 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @05:29PM (#11936843) Journal
      In related news, Ubuntu users have surged past the Gentoo community to become the #1 source of annoying, off-topic distro cheerleading. Whether it's the parent responding to statistics for webserver hosting with DistroWatch numbers or this guy [slashdot.org] responding to a question about JES vs. OES with "[Ubuntu] is the first linux distro that I've recommended to my mom!", they can be counted on for their two cents regardless of the topic.

      Once again, you see what it looks like when a new distro really starts to get some traction. That's why I don't believe that there are serious numbers of Lindows, TurboLinux or Xandros users out there -- if there were, we'd hear from them.

    • Looking at percentage increase, Ubuntu probably beats the pants off of Fedora, rising from an average hits/day of 300 in 2004 to an average hits/day of 1916 in the past month; that's a 638% increase. Using the same math for Fedora, we see a LOSS of 8%.

      Those numbers are for Page Hits to the DistroWatch web pages, which is a completely different number then installations on servers.

      I'm not sure why you think the two are related. There are many possible explanations as to why Mandrake would be searched for

  • Hmmm... (Score:2)

    by Otter ( 3800 )
    1sockchuck writes

    I dunno about Fedora, but what I *am* pretty sure of is that I don't want to know what happened to Chuck's other sock...

  • Besides Red Hat Linux starting to lose market share to Fedora (more of a change of name than a loss), it looks like Fedora is the distro of choice for new web servers, closely followed by Debian. This doesn't seem like a big surprise to me, but it's always good to see numbers. Would be more interesting to see this in context of all OSes however.
  • Fedora is the fastest growing distro because its converting people that wouldn't normally run a linux server with its ease of setup and install. When these people running fedora servers get more experiance with linux, they will learn there are much better distro's to run a server on then fedora.
    • Hopefully these same folks will not be put off linux all together when Fedora Core 4 requires a reinstall.

      Fedora is not a good choice for production anything.
      • AFAIK you can upgrade FC versions by changing the sources for yum and updating. While I dont personally run fedora (played with it with fedora 2 but I run a mix of debian and suse) I know plenty that do and thats the impression I got. SuSE does the same thing with yast and you can do a dist-upgrade on debian. If I'm wrong, you're welcome to correct me, but I dont think you need to do a complete re-install every 6 months with fedora.
        • The thing is, every six months, all the versions of all the software changes. You have to audit and review your config from a-to-z for all the changes in the individual components, every six months, to make sure that the configuration setup is still appropriate.

          With Debian, youre using old software, but that old software you can install once, and then patch it, and you are fine.

        • There is a difference between "it seems to work" and "recommend practice".

          For your personal desktop or webserver, feel free to experiment with upgrading.

          Fedora Core 3 specifically recommends a reinstall, mostly due to some fairly major changes in some important packages that upgrading will not auto handle.

          Again, for production, I-lose-my-job-if-it-doesn't-work use, Fedora is a poor choice.

  • Apache (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by dago ( 25724 )
    Also nice to see apache still holding on against MS...

  • Fedora is designated as a desktop OS. I don't think Red Hat even suggests using it as a server. I wouldn't either, at least not for anything real (I have a fc1 server at school just to learn how the stuff works; it doesn't really do anything).

    It's got a what, 6, 7-month release cycle, and maybe 16 for updates. After that it changes radically, and you'd be breaking a bunch of stuff every year or more, just to keep yourself safe from exploits. Not to mention that its bleeding-edge nature keeps it from b

    • I don't understand why people go and choose Fedora anyway.

      Because they want RedHat, without the price tag that comes with RHEL-- which starts at $349 for a 2 CPU server, $1499 if you have 4 CPUs.

      I'm not sure I could recommend RHEL or Fedora to many small shops. RHEL is expensive, Fedora is unstable.

  • The Big Reason (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sentry21 ( 8183 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @07:02PM (#11937953) Journal
    Fedora is the basic RedHat-without-the-cost installation, and has very little going for it in the server space, other than being free and easy. The one thing it does have, however, is support from other applications.

    Other than providing an RPM installation mechanism (and thus supporting software distributed via RPM) and being based off of RedHat (and thus working well with e.g. Oracle), it has one major benefit in the hosting market: control panels.

    Popular webhosting services (I use Serverbeach [serverbeach.com] as an example because I've dealt with them and know their URL offhand) offer, generally speaking, Redhat, and as such, the administration control panels available have generally targeted RedHat. ServerBeach now offers Debian servers, but as of yet, does not offer Plesk, Ensim, or CPanel on these servers, because they are not supported.

    As such, when a user goes to a company like ServerBeach and wants a control panel, they have to choose Fedora as their option in order to get it. That being said, things in that realm are changing.

    Firstly, I noticed that Plesk has Debian 3.1 support coming out in March. At that point, Plesk will be available on servers running Debian (such as those ServerBeach provides). Additionally, cPanel is working on support for Debian 3.0 (which will be easily ported to 3.1, likely with no changes) which is currently in beta. Ensim, from what I can tell, has no plans to support Debian, though for all I know it could be announced tomorrow.

    Once the popular control panels are available with Debian, then it will be easier for all-Debian companies like my own to use and promote Debian in our hosting environments. The ease-of-management provided by e.g. Plesk, along with the ease-of-maintenance and upgrading (not to mention longevity) provided by Debian. How could it go wrong?

    And since Ubuntu is so similar to Debian, it wouldn't be hard for these manufacturers to support that as well, giving it a boost too.

    Things are looking good for Debian.

  • Budget at least several hours sys admin work per server you manage each time a new version comes out to perform the upgrade.

    Allow for the odd issue to creep in. e.g. pre-existing functionality not working, or not working the same.

    And add in a bit of hair loss for the odd problem that crops up during the new distro upgrade. e.g. FC2->FC3 introduced udev which seems to cause the odd hassle.

    So, if you are 'hosting' with a distro that changes every several months, then be prepared for the extra work.

  • Does it matter? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    A web server is just a stripped system with a kernel and enough userland to run Apache or whatever and PHP/JSP/Perl/Etc. The distro is irrelevant, more or less.

  • The sole reason Fedora started to make a gain is because Redhat wanted to start charging for its OS. All those people who were using Redhat for free and getting updates suddenly found themselves without a free OS with updates. What people did is go to Fedora because it was similiar in nature to the last Redhat version (9.0).

    Fedora Core 1 did not majorly break any software and worked with major control panels without too much porting. What has happened recently is that the Core 2 and more recently Cor

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