Which Linux to choose

My first experience with linux was in 1997 when I've tried SlackWare linux 5.0. I remember how I've installed it and look like a reindeer on black screen waiting for the interface, but see nothing, only black screen and #root with blinking cursor. Well… I continued to use Windows NT 4.0 server and silently thinking about linuxzzzz guys as masochists stacked in DOS era. Until bad stuff happened. The project I appeared to be involved in requested from me to create file server for my Linguistics University library with 10 500 000 small TXT files obtained from metropolitan. Having quite fast SCSI in RAID-5 devices I couldn't realize why the performance is so slow. Another fact that this library set could contains up to 60 sub sub sub folder in depth with different languages folders names and up to 13000 thousands files per folder, by which smart gurus explained me that NTFS file system will not cope with it. 

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Proper place for heavy load web server

Good question…  what is proper? The answer is – your budget will determined what is proper. My proposals will be suitable for Web Servers with PHP projects, using MySQL as a database and Nginx as a web server.

I do not speak here about hired dedicated servers or hostings. Only collocation with proper server or even your company/home server room with serious ISP channel will be reviewed here.

If you will go to collocation, in most cases you will be limited by corporate style rack servers, though there are might be some options how to avoid huge expenses.

If will build company/home server room, than the great number of possibilities how to save the money and make service reliable will become available for you.

The biggest pros of colocation are:
1) Security.
2) Monitoring.
3) Power supply protection Continue reading