Firstly, I'm setting up a web server and gone from planning to use Ubuntu (due to some familiarity as a desktop at home) to CentOS based on recommendations by experienced webhosters.
However now that I looked into CentOS, I find myself at a point where it's transitting to a major new version. So the key question for me is, should I wait for CentOS 5 to be released or just go for 4.4?
Being rather new to Linux, my attempts to try to figure out the differences between the two has been rather futile since I can't readily tell what is really important to me or not. All that I think I'm sure of now is that 5 would support virtualization using Xen and 4.4 doesn't have it. This alone is food for thought since the idea of being able to compartalize each website in their own VM sounds good in the long run.
I'm tempted to wait for 5 since I'm reluctant to run the risk of having to upgrade a live server to version 5 and have it failed specutacularly if I screw it up. On the other hand, it's uncertain when 5 will be out and definitely waiting more than another 2 weeks isn't quite acceptable without compelling reasons.
Hence I'll appreciate it if the knowledgeable folks on this mailing list can advise which is the wiser route to go.
Some additional information which may be relevant to the decision.
1. RAID : Was planning to run "hardware" RAID 1 on the server and has noted comments that software RAID 1 on Linux may be better than raid 1 using onboard firmware controllers.
2. Software that would be running on the server would include Apache 2.x with ASPx support, php 5.x, MySQL 5.x, Exim, ProFTPD, Direct Admin (supposed to be developed on RH and one user apparently tested it to work right out of the box with 5 Beta, part of the reason why I decided to go with CentOS)
3. Hardware to be used would be Intel Core 2 Duo on an Asus P5B-VM-D0 (Q965, ICH8-D0, Intel GMA3000 GPU) with SATA hard disks.
4. Network bandwidth control based on request IP or domains (i.e. connections to IP #1 can be limited to 512Kbps, while connections to IP #2 can be limited to 1024Kbps, or connections to www.domainA.com is limited to 256Kbps etc.
Thanks!
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