Hey there, I'm going crazy choosing a distro for a server. I have experiences on debian and centos, I can work with this 2 beast without any sort of problem because I'm comfortable with all the 2 so I have a dilemma.

I used them in production without any major problem and successfully.

I like stability over bleeding edge and this 2 distro are very stable.

I don't run cluster at the moment and don't know if I will run in the future, I run mostly web servers with postgresql apache and php, some tomcat, backup server, nas server. I 'm not a developer but sometimes I develop some piece of code in C, php, python and bash scripting. Ah docker.

What I like in debian: more vanilla packages, stability, giant repo so no need add third repos, universality because I can use the same version on server, desktop, workstation and laptop
. Really free not as beer but not covered by giant corporate. Fast security uodate.

What I like in centos: 10 years of support, most software vendors support it, selinux, I like its configuration way (things are more ordered).

What are your suggestion on this dilemma?

If you can't decide one way or another, flip a coin. (If you object to the result, that means you'd already decided.)

Or wait a few months to see if any of CentOS replacements being developed are enough to tip the scales.

Googe search term " How to forge the perfect debian server " would be my suggestion.

It ,search term works for CentOS but I hear CentOS has gone through a major mash up lately.
Most of the CentOS tutorial server pages are going to be outdated soon maybe.

CentOS has been in the news lately due to its suddenly curtailed support cycle. In short, CentOS 8 is cancelled. There might be community replacements soon, or it might be dead a dead concept. I've written it off permanently for my projects.

If you are familiar with Debian, then you might consider Devuan, which is Debian minus the many systemd incursions. So if you are going with stock Debian, I would suggest giving serious consideration to Devuan.

Another option, if you are familiar with Debian, would be Ubuntu server LTS. It's rather similar and the Long-Term Support edition has a base of 5-years of support with an extension of up to 10 years total for paying customers. There are some key differences from Debian but you would find it very familiar for the most part.

RedHat have moved the EOL of CentOS 8 forward from mid 2029 to end of 2021, and are switching the CentOS brand to their RHEL beta "CentOS Stream".
(i.e. changing from a stable binary-compatible downstream of RHEL to a less stable upstream of RHEL).

There may be subtle incompatibilities if people mistake "CentOS Stream" as being the same as current "CentOS", and would be of similar impact to following a v8 tutorial when running v7 (i.e. only an issue where cutting edge or deprecated functionality is involved).

Been using CentOS but with the switch to the Stream model, I am looking at moving over to Debian for the reasons other posters mentioned.

CentOS is going to switch to the stream, so it would not be as stable as it used to be. I believe Debian is more stable than CentOS stream. I run Ubuntu Server LTS on some of my servers and they are also pretty stable.

I'd go with Debian or Ubuntu Server.

One more thing I do not like about CentOS: lots of things are not part of main distro, but parts of EPEL instead. EPEL is supported by community, not by RH.
When I migrated to CentOS 8 I found, that OpenDKIM is not available, so I had to wait a couple of month for community to implement it.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1754540

So, if you need something that is not part of RH, you may be in trouble.

Also, Ubuntu supports upgrade (I was able to upgrade to the 20.04 from 18.04 with one command!) not sure if CentOS supports it.

The only reason to use CentOS (imho) is the following: you are experienced RH user and run RH on your production servers, so you do not want to change your habbits.

Hello narutikli64.

NethServer may be of some interest to you.
It is user friendly, and has a very good online manual.
Nethserver is one of my future projects.

Welcome and thank you for your contribution.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nethserver/

My VPS with my hosting provider is CentOS (and I know of other hosting providers that use CentOS for Linux-based websites, but I have no idea what's going to happen with the recent changes from RHEL and likely they don't either at this point!).

In my experience, Debian is rock-solid stable. Heck, Debian Sid is more stable than most distros' stable releases. I'd lean toward Debian, if it were me.

Just my two cents.

i would use debian.

I've always been a fan of CentOS myself but with the instability of it being owned by IBM (even before the recent news) I was on the fence about switching to Debian. I'm still on CentOS 5 on most of my servers so a bit behind and been planing an upgrade path. I personally will stick with going to Debian and already did a couple servers, but Rocky Linux (CentOS replacement) is an option too if you want to go that route as it will be independent of IBM/Red Hat.

Best bet is setup a VM and install both and decide from there. For me personally I've been wanting to try to automate more stuff so I've been playing a lot with Debian/preseed and just general ISO respinning so I can build my own custom install. I may end up basing my final decision on whatever distro makes that easier. Once that's setup I can upgrade all my boxes faster.

Debian (or Slackware). Never trusted RH, my own personal self.