CentOS is short for Community Enterprise Operating System. This is one of the top Linux distributions for servers and it's regarded as one of the most dependable and risk-free Operating Systems out there. CentOS is open-source software, so you can personalize it in any way you see fit, adding and removing packages or changing 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 overall price that you'll need to pay for a server running CentOS will be much lower as compared to 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 discover the answer to any question or problem you may have. Furthermore, each version that is released officially is supported for a decade, which is a lot longer than with any other operating system. What this means is regular safety and stability updates that provides a reliable software environment for your web applications in the long run.