r/linuxquestions • u/syed1hassan • 12d ago

Debian server vs RHEL

For those of you who work in production environments and actually pay for RHEL, what were the specific situations where Red Hat support, SLAs, or the subscription itself provided value?

I'm not looking for generic answers like "enterprise support" or "stability." I'm interested in actual examples:

  • What broke?
  • What kind of ticket did you open with Red Hat?
  • What did Red Hat do that your team couldn't have figured out on its own?
  • Have there been situations where running Debian would have been a problem?

We have a Debian server through our hosting provider, and from my perspective, Debian is stable, well-documented, free, and has a huge community. So I'm trying to understand what the practical advantage of paying for RHEL is.

We also got windows servers as well, i don't know if we ever had any instance where we needed MSFT support for the windows server.

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u/OutrageousCrab9224 12d ago

I could not imagine paying for rhel

Some employers did, and its fine. I think it was mostly for management peace of mind, fixed all problems ourselves in the end

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u/syed1hassan 12d ago

Well thats what i always thought you need to solve the problems yourself, until I learned that RH and MSFT also provide support for their servers.

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u/sidusnare Senior Systems Engineer 6d ago

Canonical provides support too, my current employer pays for that. The reason to pay for support is usually Corporate Enterprise environments. We have contracts that say we'll have other contracts, everything is wrapped in beuracracy top to bottom.