Ask HN: Which OS do you use for hosting web apps?

I've read that CentOS is the best Linux distribution for public facing applications because they take security very seriously. If you choose Ubuntu, use the LTS version so its not moving so frequently but still maintained. I use CentOS and Ubuntu for my web apps. I don't use Windows because my apps are all LAMP based and switching to Windows offers no benefit. If your Application is .Net based, you pretty much are required to use Windows (unless is Mono compatible)...

First decide whether you want to rent a virtual server or you want to use a PaaS like Heroku. If the latter, then OS is irrelevant, so I'm assuming you've decided on a virtual server.

Use a flavour of Linux. I recommend Debian. Others will recommend CentOS. There are other options, but probably stick with one of these two.

What are you using for your development environment? It might be good to have a local VM of the same distro, even if you're not ready to switch to linux on the desktop. Otherwise you might push stuff to live which break on linux, even if they work on, say, Windows or Mac. I'm thinking of stuff like whether filenames are case sensitive, and the default encoding of files read into Unicode objects (Python can behave differently on Windows and Linux).

Of course, this is all assuming you're using something cross-platform, and not a Windows-specific dev stack.

I've been using CentOS for years. It has served pretty well for my needs.

I use Google AppEngine for hosting WebApps. Lets me focus on the applications and the environment is robust, scalable, etc. You can run the AppEngine SDK on Mac, Linux and Windows so you can use whatever environment you are already comfortable with.

If you really want to get down to the hardware, consider CoreOS.

It sounds like you are not really a systems expert... so my recommendation would be Ubuntu, mainly because of the answers you will be able to find via Google compared to CentOS.

CentOS is a remix of Redhat's server, so support is generally secondhand and also a lot of the community are pretty sysadmin savvy, so you may get lost in the terse explanations and lack of hand holding.

On Ubuntu you get a wider audience, a lot of "how to" guides as well as a lot of "what do I do now" discussion forums to glean from. As to the flavor of ubuntu, you will only be doing a few things in the GUI (copy files, maybe a backup program, etc.) most of the meat is accessing and editing the config files via a terminal. I Would go with xubuntu as the GUI is not as resource intensive as the others.

For a long time, was using CentOS. In recent years, Ubuntu.