I am trying to decide wether to install FreeBSD or CentOS on my server.
I only want to have Apache, MySQL and PHP, and run a website on it.
What do you guys think I should use?
CentOS FTW! :p
It really depends what you prefer if you like a smaller disk then FreeBSD is the better one. CentOS is usually easier and more popular though. Usually used for cPanel installations
They are both very popular for servers. You'll probably see CentOS more just because it's linux but BSD is just as good if not better
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I am using CentOS.
BTW I was also thinking to search "Centos vs bsd" on google today.
I have decided to go with CentOS, because it is linux and I want to learn about linux.
Well good Joshua, but then you miss on about Unix.
Unix i prefer. TO prove it, i have a free bsd server running free bsd 4.2. I haven't updated it since it has been installed. whats that? like 7-10 years ago! Linux though... i needed to update it...
Whats the difference between open and free?
OpenBSD is a fork of FreeBSD that was built with security in mind. It's setup fairly bare bones and it's more a deny setup and you have to go add services and allow versus FreeBSD which may have installed services and allow setup.
I would go FreeBSD, which btw I do use, over CentOS. When you say Linux you have to deal with many flavors...when you search help you'll get a ton on non-centos help that won't help you at all. If I was to go with a linux flavor it would probably be CentOS for a server if only because it may offer the greatest amount of enterprise support. It's widely used by commercial site and large hosts. But so is FreeBSD.
The support and FreeBSD handbook are pretty damn good and straight forward. The project has been around forever and upgrading, installing, and maintaining are very easy. Just about everything you need is here:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/
Many would argue that FreeBSD is the more stable OS. It's a tough kernel with tried and true binaries. You can also run Linux programs on it just fine. Some even run Linux faster on FreeBSD than it does with it's own kernel.
My advice...FreeBSD. I have converted many linux users to it that were scared but once started to use the project realized it's beauty and simplicity. It's not complicated at all actually.