Linux Flavour
 

I don't want to start a flame war here or anything but...

I use Debian and have done for about 5 years for web servers, mostly
because I love the idea of "apt-get"

My question is, should I really be looking at other flavours? Who in
web server setup not desktop is leading the way in linux flavours?

RedHat has been in the enterprise class for the longest; see what web admin tools they've got. They're also still one of the biggest contributors to various projects including the Linux kernel. Since Novell are trying hard to do the same or better, see what they've got to offer.

but from your own experience is it a better offering than Debian?

Better is a very very subjective term. If you are used to Debian and are happy running it, stick with Debian. If you are looking to move to another job, they are likely to use either Red Hat or Suse/Novell. So really, pick which is the most appropriate for you.

One of the main reasons Red Hat is probably the leader is it's backed by a commercial vendor, that provides support, if purchased that is. Executives love the warm fuzzy feeling that if something goes wrong and the incompetent sysadmins they hired can't fix a problem they can call Red Hat support for help.

I agree. You can probably tune your Debian to be more or less indistinguishable from Red Hat or any other distribution with enough work. Also a good point to try SLES (from Novell) or RHEL (from RedHat) if you already are or are thinking of getting professional (paid) work doing this.

People have also been using Gentoo as a server, although not so much professionally. Gentoo is more designed to be configured and is often referred to as a meta distribution. This allows it to be faster than most other distributions. Initial configuration probably required more work (and knowledge) though.

Like mentioned Novell also provides an "enterprise" solution. Personally, I have rarely used debian, so i cannot speak about any experiences there. I would choose RHEL over SuSE any day though as far as stability and ease of administration goes.

Then again, I use RHEL a fair bit, and SuSE a wack at work. I just hate not being able to find any of the files that a lot of the other distribution's all put in the same place... Stick with what you know if it makes you happy.