CentOS is short for Community Enterprise Operating System. This is one of the leading Linux distributions for servers and it is well known as being one of the most stable and protected Operating Systems out there. CentOS is open-source software, which means that you can personalize it in whatever way you see fit, adding and removing packages or modifying the code of any of them. It's also free to distribute and use, so you won't have to pay any license fees, meaning that the total price that you'll have to pay for a server running CentOS will be lower as compared to the price for a server running an alternative OS. What makes CentOS stand out among other Linux releases is its huge developer society, which will help you get the reply to any question or problem you have. What's even more, each version that is released officially is supported for ten years, which is a lot longer than with any alternative OS. This means ordinary security and stability updates that provides a dependable software environment for your web applications in the long run.