CentOS Cloud and Dedicated Server Hosting

A reliable enterprise Linux operating system.

What is CentOS Hosting?

Steadfast Networks offers CentOS hosting through our Cloud Platform ($20/month) or as a dedicated server. As of September 27, 2011, we now offer CentOS 6, and promise to support the CentOS 6 series throughout the entire 10 year life-cycle that is typical of Enterprise Linux distributions.

To install CentOS via our Cloud Platform, all Cloud users need to do is select CentOS as their operating system of choice when setting up a Cloud Platform virtual machine following these instructions. CentOS can also be installed free of charge with all of our dedicated server offerings.

What is CentOS 6 and Why Should You Choose It?

At its heart, CentOS 6 is essentially a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the most popular enterprise Linux solution. With CentOS, though, you get all of the benefits of RHEL (full compatibility with RHEL software packages, security support) without having to pay for an extra contract just to get the RHEL technical resources, software updates, and new releases, all things that Steadfast Networks provides to you as part of our service. CentOS 6 is now the recommended operating system for Steadfast Networks dedicated servers.

When compared to older editions of the system, CentOS 6 outshines its predecessors in many ways.

• The Linux kernel has been updated to version 2.6.32 and shows several new improvements and optimizations, such as showing an increase in stability and performance, and adding support for newer hardware and storage technology.
• The default filesystem for CentOS 6 is the fourth extended filesystem (ext4). When you compare this filesystem to ext3, it offers better reliability, is much faster, and scales to much larger volumes, up to a maximum potential of 1 exabyte.
• CentOS 6 better meets the dependencies of modern automation and hosting software by updating many utilities and core packages to newer versions.
• In addition to Xen, the new OS supports virtualization using KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machines. By tightly integrating KVM into the kernel, the CentOS 6 can deliver better reliability and performance for virtualization.

If youíd like to have more information on what ís new in this latest version, we recommend checking out CentOS 6.0 and RHEL 6.0.

Video: Installation and Review of CentOS 6

System Requirements for CentOS Hosting

CentOS 6 fully supports control panels such as InterWorx, cPanel, DirectAdmin, and Parallels Plesk Panel, and the virtual machine or dedicated server is required to have at least 512 MB of memory for 32-bit and 1GB of memory for 64-bit.

CentOS 6 Tips, Tricks, and Documentation

You can find a wealth of insider tips and tricks over on the CentOS wiki. There are also helpful materials on CentOS 4 and CentOS 5. You can also head over to the Red Hat website for documentation on RHEL 6.

When using CentOS we do have local CentOS mirrors for both CentOS 5 and CentOS 6 at mirror.steadfast.net to assure the fastest download and update speeds.