Well I have never ever used FreeBSD before, it is much different from Red Hat ? I mean - file system, file locations, common commands and software support.

Would you recommend to install FreeBSD + cpanel and run reseller/shared hosting server ? Note server will host ~1000 little accounts.

What about performance? better than RH9/RHE or not ? Have you experience is it SCSI system friendly ? Thanks a lot!

Greetings:

FreeBSD is more secure out of the box than RedHat, Fedora, CentOS, and its other cousins, nieces, and nephews.

So if you don't know a lot about security; and don't plan to hire inside outside people to secure your box, you will be more secure to start with this operating system.

You should be careful on the control panel side; H-Sphere, for instance, does not recommend FreeBSD for its "control panel" service. Though, it can be used for mail and web services.

There are command syntax along with other differences than RedHat et all; so if you are more familiar with RedHat and that group of operating systems, there will be a learning curve.

Thank you.

If I recall, you get a plain BSD box when you lease a BSD system from EV1 - no cp, nothing. Even though EV1 is unmanaged hosting, they DO tend to help a lot on the RH boxes - it's what they know best. With BSD, you're totally on your own. That's not to say BSD is bad - just expect VERY minimal support.

you can use webmin along with virtualmin on FreeBSD, it looks ugly but it's easier than command line

I don't like it though

regards

Briefly:
1. The file hierarchy is organized and everything goes in the right places. Once you've read hier(7), you can work out where files are going to be without needing to search your entire drive.
2. Many utilities are built into the base systems; some will need to be installed from the ports tree. Unlike certain other operating systems, FreeBSD has very good man pages; you should refer to those before you ask google.
3. Much of the more useful administrative software is in the ports tree. I install security/freebsd-update, sysutils/portsnap, sysutils/portupgrade, and security/portaudit immediately on all new systems.



I can't say anything about cpanel -- I don't use it -- but FreeBSD is very widely used in the shared hosting market. Netcraft recently reported over 2.5 million FreeBSD-hosted websites.



FreeBSD can saturate a 100Mbps link while running Apache on any modern hardware; unless you have a database back-end, you're not going to run into performance limits on either FreeBSD or RH.

One caveat I would point out: EV1 is currently selling systems running FreeBSD 4.9, which is no longer supported. If you do get a FreeBSD system here, I highly recommend upgrading it to FreeBSD 4.10 or the upcoming FreeBSD 4.11.