Choosing the Right OS for Your VPS: Ubuntu vs AlmaLinux

A support ticket we see more than you'd expect: someone spins up a fresh VPS, picks whatever OS was first in the dropdown, then tries to install cPanel an hour later and gets hit with "unsupported operating system." Now they're rebuilding the server from scratch. The OS you pick on day one isn't a cosmetic choice - it decides which control panels you can run, how often you'll be doing major upgrades, and which tutorials you can actually copy-paste commands from.

Why this decision bites people later, not immediately

A brand-new VPS boots fine on almost any Linux distro. Ubuntu, AlmaLinux, Debian - they'll all give you a working shell and let you apt/dnf install a LAMP stack without complaint. The problem shows up two weeks in, when you try to add the one piece of software that only supports specific distros - and cPanel/WHM is the biggest one in hosting.

Symptom: "This operating system is not supported" during cPanel install

Cause: cPanel & WHM dropped Ubuntu support entirely years ago. It only installs on AlmaLinux, CloudLinux, or RHEL (and their close relatives). If you provisioned Ubuntu or Debian because it's the distro you already know, the cPanel installer will refuse to run, full stop - there's no flag or workaround that changes this.

Fix: There's no patch for this one. You need to reinstall the OS from your provider's control panel (on Getwebup this is VPS → Manage → Reinstall OS) and pick AlmaLinux 8 or 9, then run the cPanel installer fresh:

curl -o latest -L https://securedownloads.cpanel.net/latest
sh latest

Yes, this wipes the server. If you've already put data on it, back up first - there's no in-place OS swap that keeps your files intact.

The three distros you'll actually be choosing between

For a typical hosting VPS - not something exotic like BSD or Arch - it comes down to three real options:

Symptom: setup commands from a tutorial just fail outright

Cause: almost every quick VPS tutorial online is written for Ubuntu, because it's the most common distro for general-purpose servers. If your box is AlmaLinux and you paste in apt install nginx, you'll get "command not found" - not because anything is broken, but because AlmaLinux uses dnf, not apt.

Fix: know which family you're on before you start pasting commands.

cat /etc/os-release

Debian-family (Ubuntu, Debian): apt update && apt install <package>
RHEL-family (AlmaLinux, CloudLinux, Rocky): dnf install <package> (or yum on older builds)

Firewall tooling differs too - Ubuntu ships with ufw, AlmaLinux typically uses firewalld. If a guide tells you to run ufw allow 80/tcp and your terminal doesn't recognize ufw, that's the tell you're on the wrong family for that tutorial, not that your server is broken.

Picking by what's actually going to run on the box

Skip the "which one is best" debate - there isn't a universally correct answer, only a correct one for your workload:

• Running cPanel/WHM to host client sites or resell hosting - AlmaLinux, no debate. It's the only realistic option cPanel supports.
• A single app you control yourself - Node.js, Django, a Docker stack - Ubuntu LTS. The package ecosystem and community docs are deepest here, and most Docker images assume a Debian-family base.
• A mail server or something you want to touch as rarely as possible - Debian. Its release cycle is slower and more conservative, which means fewer surprises between updates, at the cost of slightly older package versions.
• You're not sure yet - Ubuntu LTS is the safest default for anything that isn't cPanel-managed. It has the largest community, the most Stack Overflow answers, and a 5-year support window on each LTS release.

Symptom: server still on an EOL Ubuntu release, apt update throws 404s

Cause: Ubuntu LTS versions stop getting updates on a fixed schedule (18.04 in mid-2023, 20.04 in mid-2025, and so on). Once a release goes end-of-life, its package mirrors get pulled or moved, and a plain apt update starts throwing 404 errors on every repository line.

Fix: check what you're running and how much runway is left:

lsb_release -a

If you're within a year of end-of-life, plan an upgrade rather than waiting for the mirrors to disappear:

do-release-upgrade

Take a snapshot before running this - a release upgrade touches core system packages and, on rare occasions, breaks a service that depended on the old version's exact behavior.

Prevention: decide before you provision, not after

If you're provisioning through Getwebup's VPS control panel, the OS list at creation time already filters to what each plan supports - if you want cPanel later, select an AlmaLinux image up front rather than reinstalling after the fact.

Getting the OS right at provisioning saves you the exact rebuild-from-scratch scenario that started this post. It's a five-minute decision that's expensive to reverse - worth the extra minute before you click Create.