Need good website hosting distro
 

What would be the best, easiest, most secure way of hosting my website in linux. What i mean, is what distro. Im seen Redhat, but i just want some more opinions.

there's really no one distro... you just need something that will run apache... they all do. that's really as far as things go.

well what i mean by distro is one that uses resources efficiently, and such

again... this is not relevant to the distro. this is based on the software your using, which is the same on each distribution. the latest version of apache will run the same on any full-scale distribution

It's true that any distro will run Apache equally well, but there are other factors you might as well consider if you have a luxury of choice.

If you are only going to run a server, you don't want to install lots of unneccessary stuff. Therefore you might chose a distro that will let you do a minimal install. If you are really concerned about space you can further investigate how 'minimal' these installs are - Ubuntu comes at around 250mb, but I think Fedora's minimal install still comes to over 400mb.

Some distros like Mandrake are easier to install, but you really need to do some work later to 'tighten' them - turn off unneeded services for example. Other distros are a bit harder to install (text based, less automated installation process), but require less work later because they don't run anything unless you told them to run it...

If you don't want to mess with your system constantly, you might look a distro that will give you a stable branch - 'stable' meaning unchanging except for security updates. For example, Debian stable, Ubuntu, or any of many free versions of Red Hat Enterprise.

If you are really concerned about security, you might want to use SELinux which is really only offered by Fedora and Tinysofa at the moment. (I'm sure you could install it on other distros as well, but then it becomes pretty complicated). In fact if you are really concerned about security you might forget about using Linux altogether, and go with OpenBSD or NetBSD.

Some distros are specifically tailored for servers, like Tinysofa, while others will offer you a choice of one-step 'server installation' in their installer. For example QiLinux - a very nice distro from Italy.

If you are going to use a very old computer with little RAM you want a distro with text-based installer because these need a lot less RAM than the pretty GUI based ones.

If you want to squeeze every last bit of performance from your hardware, even at the expense of ease of initial set-up, you might want to consider a source-based distro where you compile the whole system from source. Or at least use a system that is optimised for i686 (if you're using at least Pentium II) - it does help a bit. On the other hand if you are using really old hardware (less than Pentium II), you want to make sure your distro *wasn't* optimised for i686, because it won't run!

So, you could have some fun with this if you wanted to. But really, just about any distro will do.

I recommend Gentoo. It's a real pain to install, but the working system is a worthy prize for the burden of installing it. It runs SUPER FAST.
You just have to make sure to configure your /etc/make.conf right when installing it. Also, it doesn't start hundreds of services you've never heard of at boot unless YOU TELL IT TO. It is also super easy to maintain, you just type to update your entire box. In my first days of using Linux, I tried FC2, Suse home edition, Mandrake, and Gentoo. After installing Gentoo, I have never looked back.

Notice that this is not hype that I'm just regurgitating at you, I have actually noticed a massive performance boost over the other distros.