CentOS is an abbreviation for Community Enterprise Operating System. This is one of the leading Linux releases for servers and it is recognized as one of the most stable and protected Operating Systems available. CentOS is open-source software, so 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 have 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 lower than the price for a server running an alternative OS. What makes CentOS stand out among other Linux distributions is its huge developer community, which will help you get the reply to any kind of question or problem you might have. What's more, each version that's released officially is supported for a decade, which is much longer than with any alternative operating system. What this means is ordinary security and stability updates that will provide a reliable software environment for all of your web apps in the long run.