CentOS is short for Community Enterprise Operating System. This is one of the leading Linux releases for servers and it's well known as one of the most dependable and safe Operating Systems on the market. CentOS is open-source software, so you will be able to customize it in whatever way you see fit, adding and removing packages or modifying the code of all of them. It's also free to distribute and use, so you will not need to pay any license fees, which means that the total price that you will need to pay for a server running CentOS will be more affordable than the price for a server running an alternative OS. What makes CentOS unique among various other Linux distributions is its huge developer community, which will help you get the answer to any kind of question or problem you may have. In addition, each version that is released officially is supported for ten years, that's is a lot longer than with any alternative operating system. What this means is ordinary safety and stability updates which will provide a reliable software environment for all your web apps in the long run.