Some readers of this blog will already be Linux aficionados, but for many people Linux is still technology they only have passing familiarity with.  This week The Register asks whether 2009 will be a good year for Linux.

My initial reaction was that expressed in many of the article’s comments: a yawning lack of interest at yet another year being tipped as Linux’s coming of age, something which somebody in the tech media seems to have predicted every January for the past decade — with as boring regularity as the mainstream press run December articles on how online Christmas shopping is really taking off.

But for once there is actually an interesting point behind the question.  Linux is well known for being free software — sometimes labelled software libre, to emphasize that “free” is about freedom rather than being free of charge.  However, regardless of your political views on the open source movement, such software generally is free in the price sense as well, and that’s what becomes more relevant in the credit crunch. Read the rest of this entry »

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When we decided to offer Linux on our managed dedicated servers, we thought long and hard about which of the many Linux distributions to use, before finally choosing Ubuntu Linux — in particular Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.

Plaudits are of course always welcome, but particularly so when we learn that the care and thought we put into making a decision such as this has been appreciated. So we were pleased to read Dan Lynch at Adventures in Open Source enthusing over our Ubuntu servers.

An important part of picking a web server is knowing that you can rely on it for the long term. That’s where Ubuntu 6.06 LTS comes in, because, as Dan says:

“the LTS bit stands for Long Term Support and updates are guaranteed till 2011. That’s vital for anyone looking to build a server, the main desktop edition of Ubuntu moves so fast with a new release every 6 months, no sys admin in their right mind wants to be upgrading the OS that often. Server downtime must be kept to an absolute minimum in that game.”

Dan’s spot on here. Installing the latest and greatest cutting-edge Linux releases is great fun, experimenting with the new features … but it’s something best done on a spare computer (or your desktop, if you’re feeling brave), far away from live systems like your web server. In a web server what you want is boring predictability and stability, knowing that you can trust it to keep serving your website for years to come.

And with Ubuntu and 123-reg that’s what you get: we look after your server and apply all the security updates, so that you can concentrate on what it is you do best.

There are lots of other good Linux distributions out there too; Fedora, Suse, Mandriva, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Centos were among those we considered. But overall Ubuntu had the edge, with its winning combination of long-term support and being free to download, so that you can run the same OS on your computers as on your 123-reg dedicated server.

Thanks for the feedback, Dan.

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