As I sat down to research which distro I would have to use to be able to start
including Amazon’s Lightsail service back into these reviews, I thought “ya
know Josh, you never did do a distro showdown post like you’ve been talking
about”
And here we are. The following table shows which distributions (and versions)
are currently available on DigitalOcean, Lightsail, Linode and Vultr.
I took some liberties to combine the trivial version differences and completely
omitted the available architectures as I would have had to spin up quite a few
boxes to actually verify things.
| Distro | Version | DigitalOcean | Lightsail | Linode | Vultr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Linux | 2018.03.0 | ✔ | |||
| Arch Linux | Rolling Release | ✔ | |||
| CentOS | 6.8 | ✔ | |||
| 6.9 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| 6.10 | ✔ | ||||
| 7.5 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
| CoreOS | Stable | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Beta | ✔ | ||||
| Alpha | ✔ | ||||
| Debian | 8.7 | ✔ | |||
| 8.10 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| 9.5 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Fedora | 26 | ✔ | |||
| 27 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| 28 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Fedora Atomic | 28 | ✔ | |||
| FreeBSD | 10.3 | ✔ | |||
| 10.4 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| 11.1 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| 11.2 | ✔ | ✔ | |||
| Gentoo | Rolling Release | ✔ | |||
| OpenBSD | 6.3 | ✔ | |||
| openSUSE Leap | 15.0 | ✔ | |||
| 42.2 | ✔ | ||||
| 43.3 | ✔ | ||||
| RancherOS | 1.4.0 | ✔ | |||
| Slackware | 14.1 | ✔ | |||
| 14.2 | ✔ | ||||
| Ubuntu | 14.04 LTS | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
| 16.04 LTS | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
| 17.10 | ✔ | ||||
| 18.04 LTS | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Windows Server | 2012 R2 | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| 2016 | ✔ | ✔ |
Worth noting that Vultr actually lets you upload your own ISO so you really
could run ANY distribution of your choosing. In fact, they even have an ISO
library that is pretty loaded up!
Lightsail offered the least amount of options and some of the available versions
were somewhat dated (hence why I had dropped them from this comparison once
newer Debian and Ubuntu had been released).
Linode offered a handful of distributions that nobody else offered, but at the
same time doesn’t support FreeBSD (which I know is a deal breaker for some
folks).
Ubuntu was hands down one of the most widely supported distributions making it a
great choice if you like to hop between hosts regularly.
Windows isn’t really my cup of tea but if it’s your jam, Lightsail and Vultr
both offer a couple of Windows Server versions.
All that said, I would have to say that Vultr’s availability of both Linux, *BSD
and Windows editions coupled with the fact that you can bring your own ISO makes
it the clear winner for me if solely shopping for a host based on OS
availability.
As always, if this post swayed your decision in any way, it would be great if
you signed up with my referral links.
