encyclo - 2:46 am on Feb 21, 2009 (gmt 0)

I'd heard the Fedora Core is the best of the three for "serious" hosting use

I disagree totally with this assertion - Fedora is basically the beta phase for Red Hat Enterprise Server - it changes rapidly and there is no long-term support for older versions.

I use Ubuntu on the desktop (and love it) but I've never used it as a live webserver so I can't comment on its abilities in that context. CentOS is repackaged RHEL, so comes with the same multi-year patch cycle as the commercial version. Assuming you don't want to upgrade the server's OS every six months and you don't need the very latest packages in the Fedora release, then CentOS is a much better bet than Fedora.