CentOS is short for Community Enterprise OS. This is one of the top Linux distributions for servers and it's recognized as one of the most dependable and protected Operating Systems available. CentOS is open-source software, so you are able to personalize it in any way you see fit, adding and removing packages or altering the program code of any of them. It's also free to distribute and use, so you won't need to pay any kind of license fees, meaning that the total price that you'll have to pay for a server running CentOS will be cheaper than the price for a server working with some other OS. What makes CentOS stand out among other Linux releases is its huge developer society, that will help you get the answer to any kind of question or problem you might have. In addition, each version which is released officially is supported for a decade, that is is longer than with any alternative OS. This means frequent protection and stability updates that will provide a great software setting for your web apps in the long run.