No, seriously, what is the best distro for web applications?
SwellJoe: This has been asked repeatedly.  Do a search.  No, seriously.  Search first.I universally recommend Debian or CentOS for our customers (and we deal with thousands of folks building web applications and websites--I have a huge swath of data in my head on how much trouble each choice causes).  Ignore this advice at your peril.  CentOS is the one I recommend for newbies...just because the documentation out there is so much better, the support channels are so much more populous, and so much software is tested first on CentOS.  I really like Debian, personally, and the package selection is vast and wonderful, but for a newbie CentOS is just a simpler choice.FreeBSD is a fine choice, if you know you want FreeBSD and you know why you want FreeBSD.  Since you've asked a bunch of strangers for advice, this is not you.  So, FreeBSD is not a good choice for you.Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you'd have to be retarded, or hate yourself, to choose Gentoo for a server.Oh, yeah, hosting providers almost all support CentOS and Debian.  Gentoo and FreeBSD, not as much.  I don't know of any hosting providers that offer Gentoo, actually, and if I saw one that did, I'd pretty much write them off as amateurs.  People who are passionate about FreeBSD are often extraordinarily savvy, and there are a few FreeBSD-focused hosts.