What you get when you pick Debian here
A clean image from the upstream Debian mirrors, not a modified one. No agent, no telemetry package, no vendor repository added, no monitoring daemon installed as a favour. The first thing on the disk is Debian and the second thing is your SSH key.
That matters more here than it does elsewhere. This estate publishes the complete inventory of records it holds, and an image with a phone-home agent in it would make that document a lie.
Debian 13 or Debian 12?
Take 13 unless something you depend on has not caught up. It is the current stable release, it has the newer kernel and a much better story on recent hardware, and its support window runs longer.
Debian 12 is offered because a great deal of production software was certified against it and is still being certified against it. It is not the legacy option; it is the conservative one, and there is a real difference.
Where it runs
On a virtual machine it is the fastest thing to a working box: a median deploy of about fifty-five seconds and a machine that needs nothing from you afterwards. On bare metal it is the usual base for running your own containers or a KVM host built by hand rather than through a hypervisor appliance.
Both come with a control panel if you want one — the open-source panels are free, and they are the ones with no licence server to phone home to and no company that can withdraw a key. On this estate that is not a small point.
The unglamorous argument
Debian’s actual feature is that nothing happens. No forced major upgrade, no repository that starts requiring an account, no licence that changes after an acquisition. For infrastructure that is supposed to outlast the project that put it there, that is worth more than any benchmark.
Questions people actually ask
Can I run a custom Debian preseed or my own image?
Yes. Custom ISO is offered on both virtual machines and bare metal, with PXE on bare metal, so you can install from your own media and your own answer file.
Is root access included?
Full root on every product, with a rebuild and a snapshot from the panel and out-of-band access on bare metal. There is no managed tier where somebody else holds the keys.
Do you patch it for me?
No, and that is deliberate: an unattended-upgrades daemon that we control is a channel into your machine. You get a clean system and it is yours.
What it is genuinely good at
- The largest package archive of any distribution, so the thing you need is usually one
apt install away rather than a build.
- A stable release that genuinely does not move: security fixes only, no surprise version bumps in the middle of a Tuesday.
- The base almost every tutorial, container image and vendor installer assumes, which makes everything else easier.
Choose a different one if
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Ubuntu
You want vendor packages and commercial drivers to be somebody else’s problem, or you need an LTS with five years of predictable dates.
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Alpine Linux
The machine is small and single-purpose and you would rather it booted in 40 MB than 900.
-
AlmaLinux
Your software vendor certifies against Enterprise Linux and support depends on it.
That list is here because a page that cannot name a situation where something else is the right answer is an advertisement. Every image on this estate is included in the price of the machine, so there is nothing to sell you here — only the one that fits.
Versions and support dates are checked against upstream when they change. Last revised 30 juillet 2026.
Every price on this estate is published in full, in one place. See the whole catalogue