CentOS is short for Community Enterprise Operating System. This is one of the leading Linux distributions for servers and it is regarded as being one of the most dependable and risk-free Operating Systems on the market. CentOS is open-source software, which means that you're able to personalize it in any way you see fit, adding and removing packages or altering the program code of all of them. It's also free to distribute and use, so you will not need to pay any kind of license fees, meaning that the overall price that you'll have to pay for a server running CentOS will be much lower than the price for a server running an alternative OS. What makes CentOS stand out among various other Linux distributions is its huge developer community, that will help you get the reply to any question or problem you might have. What's even more, each version which is released officially is supported for 10 years, which is longer than with any other OS. What this means is regular safety and stability updates which provides a stable software setting for your web applications in the long run.