Jul 23

Why Debian?

Company, Open Source debian, linux, servers, technology Add Comment (0)

We’ve recently been restructuring some of our servers here at Essential and shut down our Windows resseller acocunt at Fast2Hosts after 5yrs service. We’ve recently setup two new servers at our Studley datacentre providing fast, reliable hosting and expanding our CRM services.

So on to the subject of the post. Why Debian? Well for those not of the techy persuasion Debian is a server OS like Windows, Unix, etc. In fact its a ‘flavour’ or distribution of Linux. You may have heard the old saying about over 70% of the Internet’s servers run on Linux well Debian happens to be a major chunk of that and there’s a lot of good reasons why:

• Reliability - From our personal experience and the stats out there Debian is by far the most reliable server OS available.
• Simplicity - Due to the robust nature of the OS build Debian has made it incredibly easy to maintain. With Aptitude handling program installation and DPKG handing configuration, Debians ease of use makes working with it a pleasure.
• Aptitude - This is actually an app distributed as part of Debian. Its called a package manager and it makes the task of installing, updating and managing software an absolute breeze. Seriously - its easier than Windows and its ‘point-and-click’ method. Not only that it will install anything else you need to get things working. Want to install a MySQL database? Simply type:

  aptitude install mysql

• Stability - Similar to reliability above but this is more about Debians overall solid build. Its one of the most integrated OS’s out there and you can tell form using it that they’ve put effort into every small detail of the system. With over 2000 developers worldwide and thousands more volunteers working on the codebase this OS has a testing and development team unmatched by any other in the world of open or closed source projects. If you include Debian derivatives such as Ubuntu we’re talking of hundreds of thousands. Thats one hell of a seal of quality.
• Users - So who else uses Debian? Well here’s just a small taster:
  • Boeing - Commercial Flight Test Data Systems.
  • City of Munich - Being used as the main system and configuration platform for the city.
  • Digg - One of the biggest news sites on the net receiving millions of hits per day.
  • The Register - Major UK IT news service.
  • Technorati - Worlds biggest blog search engine.
  • Council of Europe - Uses Debian for their servers (SMTP, POP, DNS, etc).
  • Semiconductor Physics Group, Cavendish Lab, University of Cambridge - Providing NFS, NIS, CUPS to over 100 workstations.
  • Bittorent - The original torrent service uses Debian.
  • Ministry of Public Administration (Spain) - Have transferred over 8000 of their Windows workstations to Debian.
  • Thawte - One of the biggest internet security and certification agencies in the world.
  • United Drug Plc - Irish pharmaceutical company.
  • OpenDNS - An open and free DNS service.
  • Many, many, many more - too many to list but here’s some more you may have heard of.

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