Published: 24 September 2026
The operating system dropdown is the one decision on the order form that you cannot cheaply undo later. The plan size you can change. The country you can move, with a cutover. The distribution you picked is what every runbook, package name and config path on that machine assumes for the rest of its life.
We keep 26 install images on the form. This is how we would choose between them.
The short answer
| If you… | Pick |
|---|---|
| Have no strong opinion and want the least surprise | Debian 13 |
| Follow tutorials, use PPAs, or run anything with an "install on Ubuntu" page | Ubuntu 24.04 LTS |
| Need to match an enterprise RHEL environment | Rocky Linux 9 or AlmaLinux 9 |
| Are inheriting a CentOS 7 estate | AlmaLinux 9 (the migration story is best documented) |
| Want the newest kernel and userland and accept the churn | Fedora |
| Run ZFS, jails, or a network appliance workload | FreeBSD 15.0 |
| Want a rolling release and know why | Arch Linux |
If you stopped reading here you would be fine. The rest is why.
Debian — the default we would pick
We offer Debian 10, 11, 12 and 13. Take 13 unless something forces you older.
Debian's virtue is that it does very little you did not ask for. A minimal install is genuinely minimal, the release cycle is slow and predictable, and upgrades between major versions are unusually reliable for anyone who has followed the release notes. On a 2 GB VPS that matters: less base memory spent on things you are not using leaves more for the thing you actually installed the server for.
The cost is package age. A Debian stable release freezes its versions, so mid-cycle you will be some way behind upstream on fast-moving software. For a database, a web server or a container host that is a feature. For a language runtime that ships a new minor version every quarter, it means you will be installing from upstream anyway.
Ubuntu — the one everything is documented against
We offer Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, 22.04, 24.04 and 26.04 LTS. Take 24.04 unless you have a specific reason to be on 26.04, and do not start anything new on 18.04 or 20.04 — they are there for people restoring old systems, not for new builds.
Ubuntu's real advantage is the ecosystem assumption. When a project publishes one set of install instructions, they are usually Ubuntu instructions. When a vendor ships one binary package, it is usually a
.deb tested on Ubuntu LTS. If your time is worth more than your ideological position on snaps, that is a serious argument.The trade is that the base install does more, in more ways, than Debian's. Most of it is harmless; some of it will surprise you once.
Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux — when you need RHEL compatibility
We offer both at versions 8 and 9, plus CentOS Stream 9 and 10 and Oracle Linux 9. If your organisation runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or your vendor certifies against it, one of these is the answer and the choice between Rocky and Alma is close to arbitrary — both track RHEL, both are free, both have credible governance.
Pick version 9 for anything new; 8 exists for compatibility with an existing estate. CentOS Stream sits ahead of RHEL rather than behind it, which makes it a reasonable development target and a poor production target if the point was stability.
Fedora — newest, and it shows
We offer Fedora 40, 41, 43 and 44. Fedora gives you current kernels, current toolchains, and current everything, roughly a year or more ahead of what will eventually be in RHEL. That is genuinely useful when you need hardware or kernel features that stable distributions have not reached yet.
It is the wrong choice for a server you want to forget about. The support window is short, so a Fedora machine is on a treadmill: upgrade roughly twice a year or fall off support. Choose it deliberately, not by accident.
FreeBSD — not Linux, and sometimes that is the point
We offer FreeBSD 14.1, 14.2 and 15.0, and they run as full KVM guests like everything else. FreeBSD earns its place for three things: ZFS as a first-class root filesystem, jails as a mature container primitive that predates the Linux equivalents by a decade, and a network stack with a long reputation in routing and firewall workloads.
The cost is ecosystem. Container tooling, vendor binaries, and a great deal of "curl this script" software assume Linux. If you already know FreeBSD, none of this is news and you will be happier on it. If you do not, a VPS you are learning on is a fine place to find out — at €0.0056 an hour in Bucharest, an afternoon of experimenting costs about two cents.
Arch and openSUSE Leap — the two ends
Arch is a rolling release: always current, no version upgrades, and a maintenance model where you read the news before you update. On a server that is a real commitment; people who want it know exactly why.
openSUSE Leap 15.6 and 16.0 sit at the other end — a stable, enterprise-derived base with the best graphical and command-line administration tooling of anything here. Under-appreciated, and a reasonable choice if its tooling matches how you like to work.
Three practical notes
- The image is not a life sentence, but the reinstall is destructive. Every plan has a reinstall button in the panel that lays down a fresh image — it wipes the disk. Decide before you have data on the machine, or take a copy first.
- Match your team, not the benchmark. The performance difference between these on the same KVM plan is noise next to the difference between an operating system your team can debug at 03:00 and one they cannot.
- Try before you commit. Any plan can be ordered by the hour at the monthly price divided by 720, so standing up three machines with three different distributions for an afternoon costs a few cents. Just remember that powering one off does not stop the charges — a stopped virtual machine still holds its RAM, disk and IP on a node. Delete the ones you did not choose.
Pick one and go
The order form on the hourly VPS page carries all 26 images and five countries — Romania, Poland, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. Full root on a real KVM virtual machine, so whichever you choose, the kernel and the whole userland are yours. Prices per country are in our location pricing post, and if you are still deciding between a VPS and bare metal, our VPS versus dedicated server explainer covers that fork.