CentOS is short for Community Enterprise Operating System. This is one of the leading Linux releases for servers and it's regarded as being one of the most reliable and risk-free Operating Systems available. CentOS is open-source software, which means that you will be able to customize it in whatever way you see fit, adding and removing packages or updating the program code of any of them. It's also free to distribute and use, so you won't have to pay any kind of license fees, which means that the overall price that you'll have to pay for a server running CentOS will be cheaper than the price for a server running another OS. What makes CentOS unique among various other Linux distributions is its huge developer society, which will help you get the reply to any question or problem you have. What's more, each version which is released officially is supported for ten years, that is is a lot longer than with any alternative operating system. What this means is regular safety and stability updates which provides a great software environment for your web applications in the long run.