I have a choice of either of these as an image to install on my webserver (used to host multiple domains, email, and FTP for each domain). Both are LTS (long term support) packages. I have a lot of experience with 12.04 (2 years) so I'm comfortable with it. I know 14.04 can't be that much different from the server/command line perspective, but kernel wise and security, I'm not sure.

Does anyone have any experience with the two and can make an informed suggestion as to which would be a better server?

I also have options with CentOS 6.5 with Parellels Plesk Panel (which is nice, Ubuntu doesn't get that for some reason..).

Anyone have an opinion on what would be the best solution here?

Is 14.04 based on 3.x kernel? If so you might want to go that route just so you're learning the way things are trending in Linux.

Even with LTS if you've already been using 12.x for 2 years you have to assume its life will be shorter than a newer version like 14.04.

Here we're a RedHat shop so would likely choose CentOS6.5 given your choices but that is still 2.6.x kernel. Ideally we'd prefer to move to CentOS7 which is 3.x kernel. Internally we've already started building servers with RHEL7 which is what CentOS7 is derived from. There are significant differences not just in kernel but Linux overall is trending this way so it makes sense when building new servers to try to use the newest OS version possible especially if long term support is required. (Of course if one has 3rd party packages and support is important on those the strategy might be different e.g. for our Oracle installs we're still restricted to RHEL6 for DB and RHEL5 for middle tier.)

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