The most used distribution in hosting companies
 

Hello,
Why do most hosting companies use Red Hat-based distributions such as CentOS, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc., and a distribution such as Debian is used less?

Thank you.

Where do you get your information?

I doubt that is true, the Red Hat thing. It is not really possible to obtain accurate information on this and that is for the very simple reason given in the first paragraph at the Wikipedia site at the link below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_...rating_systems

Lots of sites will give opinions on what they think is best but it is difficult to get actual, accurate information. What I have seen recently is that Debian/Ubuntu have surpassed Red Hat and its derivatives, particularly in regard to web servers.

Hi,
Thank you so much for your reply.
When you want to order a web server, they put most Red Hat-based distributions first.

Hello,
Ubuntu maybe, but not Debian.

Before IBM purchased RedHat I recommended it often. The stability, support, documentation, and community were excellent. If you are going commercial that support matters! It also mattered that your could get a community supported clone that was binary compatible for your test/uat/development platforms where support was not needed (or not at the same level). (CentOS)

Now Red Hat is IBM, and they have shed most of the developers, dumped on the community, killed CentOS, and restricted access to some documentation and much of the sources.

Currently I recommend SUSE, or Debian with a third part support contract. IF you need something to fit into an RHEL ecosystem that is not RHEL, there is AlmaLinux and (a favorite) Rocky Linux. Ubuntu is an option, but I cannot recommend it for the same reason I cannot support IBM as an option: they do not value or support the FOSS community that created the value in the first place.

A hosting company needs good stability, AND the OS support that is excellent. At one time SUSE (in the EU) and RHEL (in the USA) were the top choices: thus were the most common.

Right. Now we can see where you're coming from. The short answer to your question is: Commercial support. RedHat comes with it. Most others don't... Debian included.

Getting back to the original question, I think a major factor is the long life-span of a release version before final EOL. Consequently, sites need to be migrated to new servers less frequently.

I personally know that one of the largest hosting providers is recommending ALMA for Linux hosting now that CentOS v. 7 is breathing its last breaths.

When RedHat went to IBM we still wanted a low-cost Linux distribution that installed and worked well on Cisco hardware. So we went to CentOS.
Now that CentOS is effectively non-production-suitable after version 8, we'll probably go to Rocky Linux 9, as it's closest to CentOS and it will (probably) install best on Cisco hardware.
We looked into Debian or Ubuntu. But they do not play well with the Cisco UCS hardware BIOS.