I found out recently that CentOS is a GREAT "replacement" for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. CentOS is a project of the cAos Foundation, They take the actual Red Hat source code and compile them and maintain them on their own mirrors. The advantage is that they are completely binary compatible with RHEL (in fact it IS RHEL with the RedHat logos removed!) Also, you can use up2date with CentOS to get updates for security, kernel, application, etc. components without having to pay Red Hat for the service. I have "upgraded" an RHEL 3.0 server to CentOS and it worked perfectly! I have also installed "cold" from the CDs and that went very well! I can highly recommend this distro!

Yeah, it's a very good distro. I have noticed a lot of hosting companies are now using it instead of the official RHEL.

Yeah, I think in many cases it may be like my situation. I paid for a year's worth of Red Hat support back when it was, what... $99.00 per server? Then they raised the cost to over $300.00. I have three web servers... that is a lot of money! So, as their RH support "runs out" I am now moving them to CentOS. I am a very small hosting company, doing mostly non-profits and quite a few "gratis" sites. I just couldn't justify the higher rates! CentOS works for me! I am doing more with Debian too... now that the new network installer is so much better.