[Sussex] A funny thing happened on the way to the Net

[Gareth Ablett]

Hey

On 15/12/05, Steve Dobson <steve at dobson.org> wrote:
>
> Morning All
>
> First thanks to Nik for arranging last night.
>
> In this morning's surfing I read an article [1] that puts Debian
> a strong second and Fedora third as the Linux distros used on
> Web Hosting systems.  Red Hat was first - no surprise there.
> But isn't it nice to see that Debian, a community run project
> with no company behind it, placed so highly?


Good for Debian, infact I believe this is a great choice for providers
because of its stability.

What surprised me the most was Gentoo's showing.  Now before you hit
> the reply button and cause me to put on my asbestos suit (please
> don't, it's just back from the cleaners after having the last set
> of burn marks removed) I'm not getting at Gentoo.  Gentoo is
> a distro that I think as targeted at developers, or people who
> want access to (or close to) the cutting edge.


why...... the hell does this supprise you, if you just think clearing about
this what to most people want, PERFORMANCE & CUTTING EDGE TECH, 1st so they
can be faster then the others and 2nd so they can have better features then
the others.
with a good team behind it, it shoudnt be a problem.

Cutting edge releases (as opposed to just bug fix patches) are by
> nature more buggy.  If you're a developer, or a reviewer (or just
> what to play) then a distro that make it easy to get at the latest
> and greatest would be a positive advantage.  You don't mind helping
> to find (and fix) the bugs.
>
> But what is such a distro doing in a survey of Web Hosting
> Distribution Share?  Surely here stability and reliability are the
> watch words?  Surely everyone is looking for a platform that will
> offer them the most reliability on a system that they are buying
> to be very public facing?
>
> Apparently not.  There is a market for distros that offer other
> advantages.  Is FLOSS, by providing an environment were cost
> is not a factor to the capabilities a system offers, showing that
> the market place is a far more complex and that there are a
> significant number of players that are prepared to do things
> differently - to buck the trend?  I think so.
>
> How does Red Hat see the competition?  Sure it has three times
> the share of it's closest commercial rival.  But it is Debian
> that is kicking at Red Hat's heals.  How does SuSE get a bigger
> slice of the market when the two distros in front of it are free?


Is SuSE's aim to be the largest website host though, or is the aim to be a
desktop?

So what do the Debian and Fedora placements represent?  Are there
> organisations that want a web server but don't want to (or can't
> afford to) spend the extra money on support?  How many of those
> systems represent organisations that don't think that the services
> offered by RH, SuSE, and the like are worth the price charged?
>
> The survey points out that the fastest growing distros are
> the non-commercial ones.  Are the big wigs at Red Hat, Novell,
> etc worried by this?  Or is it that the web hosting market is
> bigger if entry costs can be kept to a minimum?  Are the real
> winners in the Linux community not Red Hat and SuSE, but
> hardware companies like Rackspace, 1&1 or Affinity?  Are Dell,
> Compact and other PC retailers missing sales by not offering
> a package that comes with an non-commercial OS but with no
> backup for the software?
>
> Steve
>
> [1]
> http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/05/strong_growth_for_debian.html
>
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