Ubuntu and servers

I love Ubuntu. I really do. I've been using it for about 9 months now, both at home and work. It is flexible and easy to upgrade. Recently, I was spouting off about how great Ubuntu is, and someone asked my why then I wouldn't use it in a server environment. My response?

Mostly the right tool for the job argument. Ubuntu is designed to be a workstation distro. Ease of use often goes hand-in-hand with lax security measures. RedHat is a good choice for home rolled production servers. Debian and Slack if you have a bit more experience. (Debian is pretty darn easy, especially coming from Ubuntu)

The best reason I know of, is when you run into problems on your server, you want active forums of experts who can help you. RH, Debian, and Slackware all have admins with gobs of experience who will help you. The Ubuntu server crowd is not going to be as robust.

Now, all of that being said, I do all of my development (rails included) on a VMWare virtual machine. Most of them are running Ubuntu in server mode. The reason I do this is because it is dead simple to set up, and file structure is exactly the same as my base machine. It makes things easier.

Bottom line, you can certainly use Ubuntu for a production server, but you'll be mostly on your own fighting an uphill battle to get the machine secure. You can do it, but it will take research.

Last word, I've only ever had one machine compromised, and it was a Fedora box. So take all the nice things I said about RedHat with that grain of salt.