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I tend to agree with gediminasbyt on this subject. Migrating to a new platform requires a detailed knowledge of not only the platform you're moving from, but the platform you're moving to.
Where I work, I manage 2003 Domain Controllers and a CentOS Web Server. CentOS is a Red Hat clone that is built from the source rpms of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is essentially the same OS as RHEL, minus the paid support. We use to run Fedora and it was great, but for our environment, guaranteed stability took precidence. Fedora is stable, but RHEL/CentOS is more stable.
The trade off is that you will have to manually compile Apache, PHP, and MySQL if you want the latest stable versions of those packages, since RHEL/CentOS do not upgrade these packages until they've been out for several months.
I also agree that there is no "one" best distro. Each distro has it's strengths and weeknesses that have to be considered. It might be good to note, though, that many mainstream hosting providers are making a switch to CentOS because it offers the stability of RHEL, at the price of Fedora Core..... FREE
Another benefit of Red Hat based distros is that you get all the great tools Red Hat has developed over the years to simplify system administration. IMHO, Red Hat, and Red Hat clones are some of the easiest distros to learn and live with. The trade off is that you really need to get to know the system in order to optimize its performance and security. But that should be done anyways.
Sorry there is no clear cut answer to this question, but then again, that is the case with most things.
Best Regards,
James
Insanity can be defined as "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
Stupidity is not a crime. Therefore, you are free to go.